Winter India

BY ER SCIDMORE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES

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UMiVEUiSlTY of r.f.
aT
LCC ANGELES

Winter India

THE SACRED BO-TEEE AND THE DIAMOIvD THRONE, EUDDHA-GAYA.

THE CKNTER OF THE IINJVERHE ANl) THE VERANDA OK KNOWLEDGE.

Winter India

By

Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

Author of "Jinrikisha Days in Japan," "Java: The Garden of the East,'
and "China: The Long-Lived Empire"

New York
The Century Co.

1903

"■- <^-»' ^ >4»'

Copyright, 1903, by
The Century Co.

Published March, IQ03

THE OE VINNE PRE89

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TO

CAROLINE TOUSEY BURK.AM

THE FRIEND OF

AN INDIAN WINTER

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I On India's Coral Strand 3

II Trichinopoli and Tanjore 21

III With Chidambram's Brahmans 34

IV For the Honor and Glory of Shiva .... 51
V Madras and the Seven Pagodas 64

VI Madras and Calcutta 80

VII Calcutta in Christmas Week 89

VIII The Greatest Thing in the World .... 105

IX Mahabodhi, the Place of Great Intelligence 116

X The Sacred Bo-tree 133

XI The Greatest Sight in the World .... 149

XII Benares 165

XIII LucKNOW 177

XIV Agra 185

XV Akbar, the Greatest Mogul of Them All . 202

XVI Delhi 213

XVII Old Delhi 227

XVIII Lahore 239

XIX The End of the Indian Empire 256

XX Through Ehtber Pass with the Caravans . 276

XXI Amritsar 298

viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

XXII Simla 312

XXIII Alwar 323

XXIV GrWALIOR 335

XXV Jeypore 344

XXVI Mount Abu and Ahmedabad 357

XXVII The Caves op Ellora and Karli 369

XXVIII Bombay 383

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Sacred Bo-tree and the Diamond Throne,
Buddha-Gaya Frontispiece.

PAGE

Tamil Children 5

The Great Gopura, Madura Temple 13

Detail op Gopura, Madura Temple 19

Indian Lotas 27

Gopura and Tank, Chidambram Temple 43

Pattu Thacheadar 57

Monolithic Temples at Mahabalipur 67

The Village Street 77

The Ruins and Pagodas of Pagan 91

From photograph by Bourne & Shepard.

The Fort at Mandalay 91

Vases from the Sakya Stupa at Piprawah .... 121

The Sarcophagus in the Cave . . . .■ 121

The Ekka 124

The Great Temple at Buddha-Gaya and the Sacred

Bo-tree 127

Asoka's Rail, Buddha-Gaya 143

The "Women's Ghat, Benares 151

The Burning-Ghat, Benares 159

Fakirs at Benares 169

On the Ganges , 173

X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

The Taj Mahal . 187

Private Audience-Hall and Jasmine Tower in Agra

Palace. Taj Mahal in Distance 197

RLausoleum op Selim Chisti, Fatehpur Sikri . . . 207'

Kutab minar 219

Detail op Kutab minar 231

Street Dancers, Delhi 237

The Roofs and Balconies of Lahore 245

School-boys in the Vazir Khan Mosque, Lahore . . 251

Afghan Falconer, Peshawar 251

The Mad Molla, Peshawar 269

Caravans in the Khyber Pass 287

The Golden Temple, Amritsar 301

Window at Gwalior 307

The Hall of Audience, Jeypore 315

The Old City op Amber, from the Top of the De-
serted Palace 325

The Deserted Palace, from the Lake, Amber . . . 331

The Hall of Mirrors 337

Interior op Jain Temple, Mount Abu 349

Ceiling of Jain Temple, Mount Abu 359

Tracery Window, Ahmedabad 365

Rock-cut Temple at Ellora 371

The Great Cave-temple, Karli 379

"Please Buy My NiEa^ASs" 387

INTRODUCTION

>T can hardly be said with literalness
I that one enjoys India. I had not ex-
pected to enjoy it, and it proved itself,
despite its color and pictiiresqueness,
quite as melancholy and depressing
a country as I had thought it would be; but so ab-
sorbingly interesting, so packed with problems, so
replete with miracles accomplished by alien rule, so
ripe with possibilities, that one soon overlooked the
unnecessary hardships and discomforts of travel —
travel as plain and primitive as in the Klondike, or
as if the country had been conquered only within
this decade.

The surprises, the contrasts, and the contradic-
tions administer perpetual shock and mental stimu-
lus, and the unexpected continually confronts one.
Never have I suffered with cold as in India. Not a
snake did I see or hear of in the cold-weather, tourist
season, save in zoological gardens or snake-charmers'
baskets, and the tigers were likewise caged.

There are so many Indias that no one person can
know them all, and the Winter India which the
tourist sees during the cold-weather weeks is not the
real one which the Anglo-Indian knows the year
around. The military man, the civilian officer, the

xii INTRODUCTION

missionary, planter, and merchant has each his own
India and view-point; and the British visitor, who
is passed from home to home by the endless chain
of Anglo-Indian hospitality, sees and thinks differ-
ently from the other tourists who suffer the drear
hotels, the dak banglas, and the railway-station
rooms.

The worst hotels in the world are those of India,
and a British traveler has truthfully written : ' ' You
will enjoy your traveling in India if you have so
many friends there that you need never put foot
in a hotel. If you have not, you had better go some-
where else." Each winter the peninsula holds a
growing number of surprised and resentful tourists,
who, whether they land at Bombay or Calcutta, usu-
ally conclude that the shortest route across India
is the best one. One month or six weeks is the
average stay; and very few tourists ever go to
the hills for the summer and come back to the plains
for a second cold-weather season of travel. The
average tourist sacrifices itineraries without com-
punction, and lives to warn away aged and invalid
tourists and to convince those with weak lungs and
impaired digestions that death waits in Indian
hotels.

The glamour of the East does not often or for long
enthrall one while touring Hindustan. Later it as-
serts itself, reveals its haunting charm; and then,
be it months or years afterward, he "hears the East
a-callin'." He forgets the ice in the bath-tubs at
Agra and Delhi, the bitterly cold nights in drafty,
dusty, springless cars, and in visions he sees only

INTRODUCTION xiii

"the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly
temple bells," the brilliantly costumed people, and
the miracles of architecture scattered so lavishly
from end to end of the empire.

A new India for the tourist will date from the
g:reat durbar at Delhi in 1903, and India, which has
been a winter preserve for visiting English, will be
virtually discovered and opened to a wider clientele,
made as possible and fit for luxurious travel as
Egypt. Equally this day of cheap travel and cheap
living will vanish as completely as on the Nile.

For one to announce that he will spend a winter
in India is hardly more definite or precise than to
say that he will winter in Europe. India is a very
large country,— several large countries, — since it
equals in area and population all of Europe outside
of Russia; and one travels the nineteen hundred
miles of its extent from south to north through as
many political divisions as there are great divisions
of Europe, and differing as greatly in climate, phy-
sical features, and inhabitants. The Spaniard does
not differ more from the Laplander than the sooty
Tamil from the blue-eyed Afridi, the weak Bengali
from the fighting Rajput or the fierce Sikh. Besides
the thirteen provinces under British rule, there are
six hundred and fifty native states; but only two
hundred of them are of great importance, since na-
tive states range in size from Hyderabad, the size of
Italy, to single villages in Kathiawar and tiny valleys
in the Himalayan foot-hills, empires two miles
square.

The census of 1901 gave a total of 294,360,356 in-

xiv INTEODUCTION

habitants— five times as many Hindus as Moham-
medans, and one hundred and nine times as many
natives as English. The fourteen distinct races fol-
low eight forms of religious belief, and speak some
two hundred and forty languages and three hundred
dialects ; all legislative acts are published in English,
Persian, Bengali, and Hindustani— and then only
one man in ten can read. The permanence of British
rule and the safety of British interests lie in this
diversity of race, language, government, and religion.
In division is strength, in discord is stability, since
their race hatreds, jealousies, animosities, and an-
tipathies would never permit a native leader to be
acceptable to all the native malcontents, and patriot-
ism or any national spirit is as lacking as the sense
of those words, and of even the word for gratitude.
With no common language or religion, no national
feeling, in this congress of nations, one may para-
phrase a certain interrogative and exclaim: "The
Indians ! Who are they ? ' '

One fifth of the human race dwells between the
Himalayas and the ocean ; the records of their civil-
ization go back for three thousand years, and his-
tory has been written upon history on those plains.
Rice— two hundred and ninety-five kinds of rice,
called by as many names in as many tongues— and
pulse are the staple food of this great agricultural
people, drought and famine the lot of some state or
province each year, with plague and cholera seldom
absent. Two great famines and the continual rav-
ages of the bubonic pest greatly reduced the popu-
lation during the last decade of the past century,

INTRODUCTION xv

the decrease in the native states being many times
greater than in the British provinces. Increased
areas of irrigation and cultivation have made it pos-
sible for the increasing millions to live— to half live,
according to European standards, for the Indian
coolie or agricultural worker is lovi'est in the scale of
living and wages and in standard of comfort of any
Asiatic. Great calamities and scourges afford the
only relief from over-population,— a population in
which the women are in deficit to the number of six
millions, and their illiteracy so great that only one
woman in one hundred and sixty can read.

All these diverse races and peoples are picturesque
to look upon, with their graceful draperies of bril-
liant colors and the myriad forms of turbans; but
they are not an attractive, a winning, a sympathetic,
or a lovable people. They are as antipathetic and de-
void of charm as the Chinese, as callous, as deficient
in sympathy and the sense of pity as those next
neighbors of theirs in Asia, and as impossible for the
Occidental to fathom or comprehend,— an irresisti-
ble, inexplicable, unintelligible repulsion controlling
one. India vexes one sadly because of the irrational,
illogical turns of the Indian mind and character, the
strange impasses in the Indian brain, the contra-
dictions of traits; and, because of the many things
he cannot account for or reach solution of, he quits
the country baffled and in irritation — forever the
great gulf yawning between the Occidental and the
Asiatic. "East is East, and West is West."

Not one of the innumerable tongues that he hears
spoken by the common people in the bazaars falls

xvi INTRODUCTION

musically on the ear, and beyond the numerals and
a few utility words he is little tempted to dabble even
with Urdu, the camp language, the lingua franca
of the upper part of the peninsula. Jao! (Begone !)
is the first word he learns and most constantly uses,
the last syllable uttered on leaving.

From the babel of tongues, with no conunon al-
phabet, has come a confusion of spelling, and 'the
modern or Hunterian method, although officially
adopted by the government in 1880, does not enjoy
general acceptance and use in India. Sir William
Hunter gave years to investigating and recording
local usages, to transliterating from Sanskrit and the
vernacular the geographic names of the peninsula,
and the publication of his great Gazetteer should
have ended the confusion of nomenclature. Many
of his departures were too radical for the older
Anglo-Indians to accept— Saw^fZa was not the same
as bungalow to them, kuli did not represent coolie,
nor pankha the cooling punka ; and five, eleven, and
seventy-two ways of spelling a single place-name
continue in common use — three distinct systems of
spelling and local usage still prevailing, often in
determined opposition to the Hunterian method.
The first American authority, which is followed in
this volume, does not wholly accept Sir William
Hunter's decisions. The new method will ultimately
prevail, but with another generation.

WINTER INDIA

WINTER INDIA

CHAPTER I

ON India's coral strand

^HE monkeys built a bridge for Rama to
cross to Ceylon, and sections of the
causeway by which Adam traversed
the Palk Strait remain as evidence of
his good fortune on tour; but for us
there was the worst of many bad "B. I." boats, and
a night of never to be forgotten misery, disgust, and
discomfort on the Gulf of Manaar's deceptive waters.
Of all dream nights in the tropics, none matched
that night on which we coursed slowly along the
south shore of Ceylon, from Colombo westward.
Enormous stars pulsed in an intense indigo sky, the
moon rose and, streaming across a summer sea, made
a heaven above, beneath, and far around us. In the
midst of this silvery world floated the odorous, un-
tidy coasting steamer, from whose decks we in-
stinctively lifted our skirts by day, and across which
by dark sped myriads of enormous brown roaches.
The dark boxes of cabins rustled with these fleeing
insects when a light was brought, and we retreated
to spend the night in deck chairs.

4 WINTER INDIA

Some cross current in that pent-up pocket of.
Manaar makes it a rival of the English Channel for
nausea; but at daylight the ship anchored in shal-
low, gray-green waters seven miles off the low-ly-
ing coast of the Indian peninsula— "India's coral
strand"— and for two hours it rocked there more
fully to complete the misery of two hundred coolie
passengers, heaped together on the forward deck like
so much cargo. It was slow work disembarking
these limp folk, who fell prone in every stage and
attitude of misery fore and aft on the reeling tender.
A greasy bench was reserved for us amidships, fairly
touching the boilers, and, after inhaling steam and
engine grease for an hour, we reached the snow-
white beach. Inky-black cargo coolies in red and
white draperies filed up and down the sandy shore
and the narrow pier of Tuticorin, and there was local
color to spare; color, too, in the Custom-house,
where an aldermanic black official, with an exag-
gerated sausage of a turban linked around his caste-
marked brow, received us with unctuous gravity,
listened to our declaration that we had neither
spirits, ammunition, nor firearms, and let us go
with our unopened luggage, free to wander at will
from that furthest end of the empire to the utter-
most mountain wall, without official interference or
question, welcome without passport or permit, free
from espionage and annoyance : a liberty of entrance,
a courteously opened door, that covers the American
tourist with chagrin as he contrasts it with the land-
ing at any of his own ports.

Tuticorin 's white walls and houses, white sand

'■•r"

^Tf

ON INDIA'S CORAL STRAND 7

streets, and the paling turquoise sky were back-
ground only for the stage processions and groups of
the blackest people on earth. Heavens ! how black
they were ! How very black ! When Marco Polo
came to the Malabar coast, he said: ''The children
Ihat are born here are black enough, but the blacker
they are, the more they are thought of, so that they
become as black as devils."

The Tamil people, ebony black, inky black, sooty
black, tall and spare to emaciation, lilted past us on
the thin, spindle legs of storks. A mountain of red
peppers was heaped in one white square, and scores
of the blackest Tamil women, in pepper-red dra-
peries and much silver jewelry, slowly walked and
worked around its edges. It was too theatrical, too
barefacedly a color tableau set to catch the tourist
eye, and I was convinced that it lasted only for that
half-hour. The primitive hotel facing the railway
station was but a loge looking upon the white road-
way of a stage, where a specially engaged troupe of
tall Tamils and noble white sacred bullocks paraded
for our delight. When the train came in there was
bedlam drama at the station's street door; then all
the black troupe made exit and melted away to dis-
tance and shade; there was an interval, an entr'acte,
and we went over and behind the scenes for a while.

The station-master was black, the telegraph op-
erator was shades blacker, and an uncut emerald,
swinging from the upper rim of one ear, held me with
a great fascination while he skimmed the handful of
despatches. First and last, and all of the time, in
Indian travel, one telegraphs, and then sends more

8 WINTER INDIA

telegrams ahead, to any and every person connected
with his future movements. One telegraphs to dak
banglas, to station rooms and hotels, that he is com-
ing; to station-masters that he shall want sleeping
accommodation on certain trains; to local guides to
secure their services; to high priests, magistrates,
commissioners, and commandants that he wishes to
see certain temples or sacred treasuries of jewels ;
and— the government telegraphs being moderate in
price— one may "wire" away as recklessly as an
American railway president for a comparative trifle.
The Tuticorin station walls were hung with notices
and framed regulations, and there was posted a
formidable black list of fines and punishments judi-
cially awarded ; the offender and his offense paraded
to all who travel. Pattu This and Moolie That were
fined ''for letting their cattle stray and be killed on
the track"; another had been caught "riding on the
trucks without a ticket"— presumably some passen-
gers, having tickets, do ride on the trucks. They
run the Indian railways for the good of the stock-
holders evidently, and receivers of unhappy railways
in America might learn lessons of economy in this
land of want, for this is only a periodical advertise-
ment which I cut from a Calcutta paper:

EAST INDIAN EAILWAY

Tenders for the right of picking cinders from ashpits and

pumping engines during the twelve months

ending 31st March

Tenders will be received at the office of the Controller of
Stores, East Indian Railway, Calcutta, up to noon of Thurs-

ON INDIA'S CORAL STRAND 9

flay, the 14th February , for the right of picking cinders

from ashes removed from ashpits and pumping engines
throughout the line during the twelve months from Ist April
to 31st March .

Form of tender, embodying full particulars, can be had on
payment of Re. 1 to the Company's Chief Paymaster, Cal-
cutta, or to the Storekeepers at Asansol, Jamalpur, Dinaj-
pur, Allahabad and Cawnpore, to whom applications, with
remittance, should be addressed. Applicants are also referred
to the hand-bills posted at railway stations.

All other payments, including a deposit of Rs. 100 as
earnest money, will have to be made direct to the Company 's
Chief Paymaster in Calcutta, whose receipt alone will be
recognized, and no payment in respect thereof will be re-
ceived in the Store Department. Hoondees and stamps will
not be accepted.

The Company will not be bound to accept the highest, or
any, tender, and reserves the right to accept any tender in
part only.

By order,
J. OATES,
Controller of Stores.

Calcutta.

We had heard much of the luxury of Indian rail-
way travel, of the roomy compartment and dress-
ing-room that came to the holder of a first-class
ticket without extra charge. We found that the
roomy compartment was destined for four people,
and contained two long leather-covered seats, or
couches, along the side of the ear, with two hanging
berths that could be dropped at night. The seats
had no springs and no backs, unless one chose to
lean against the single, rattling window-pane, that
lifted by a strap like a carriage window. The cast-
iron fittings in the dressing-room were ruder and

10 WINTER INDIA

more primitive than those of any American emigrant
car, and when the train began its deliberate progress,
we found that the body of the car swung so low, so
nearly rested on the trucks, that we were jolted and
shaken and deafened, as if in a coal-car, and covered
with the dust of the road-bed. Nothing different
or better was found, save once, in any part of India,
When night came, a feeble oil-lamp was introduced
through the roof, that made it possible to distinguish
outlines and large objects, but not to read.

The train jogged along northward through a flat,
cultivated country, with aloe and thorn hedges in-
closing the tracks. After the rank greenness of Cey-
lon, these dusty fields of the dry season seemed poor
and sterile. The train halted near mud villages, and
the station platforms were covered with lean and
leisurely black folks in red and white cotton dra-
peries, standing at ease, their foreheads so dotted
and striped with red, white, and ocher caste-marks,
those ciphers, crests, and hall-marks of their creed,
that they looked like so many painted red Indians of
our West on the war-path. There was the usual sta-
tion bedlam when the train drew up in darkness at
Madura, and we followed a Tamil leader out to
blacker darkness across the tracks to the dak bangla.
The coolie who carried the bearer's tin trunk on his
head stumbled over tree roots and finally struck a
branch overhead. There was a crash, a bang, and
a wreck of Tamil property, and then a flood of Tamil
language, as David, our venerable traveling servant,
poured out his wrath on the whining offender, who
had been bruised and dented a little himself.

ON INDIA'S CORAL STRAND 11

The dak bangla was Spartan in its simplicity, the
government providing only beds, chairs, tables, and
bath-tubs, the stern necessities of comfort in a hot
climate. The stillness was as intense as the dark-
ness all night, and after the chota hazri (little break-
fast) of the Indian dawn we drove three miles
across awakening Madura— a city of low, white
houses, with green cocoa-palms and broad banana
leaves the only strong color notes. The white houses
Avere dusted and clouded with the red earth sur-
rounding them, all dilapidated and in need of repair,
of fall cleaning and whitewash. All Madura was
awakening at that dewy hour, — tousled folks who
came to the doors, yawned like alligators, stretched
their leans arms in air, and scratched their heads
vigorously. Men lounged face down on charpoys,
or string-beds, or lolled on the high shelves built
in the alcoves beside the house doors, and chatted
with neighbors who had also spent the night in the
open; babies sprawled on the warm red earth, and
pious women traced religious symbols in white chalk
on the red thresholds. Every door had its sect-mark,
its religious symbol and monogram, as much as the
foreheads of the people. Every blank wall, too, was
plastered over with fiat manure cakes, the common
and universal fuel of the country, which one sees
in process of manufacture and use from end to end
of the empire ; a fuel whose rank smoke can be de-
tected in everything one eats and drinks in India,
from the earliest tea and toast of the morning to the
final rice pudding and coffee at night ; a fuel whose
use deprives the fields of their natural enrichment

12 . WINTER INDIA

and adds to the general poverty ; a fuel whose manu-
facture—the gathering, kneading, and shaping into
flat cakes to be slapped against a wall to dry — is
such ignoble work that rarely any but women are em-
ployed in the unending task.

After these early morning sights in the streets,
the fantastic Teppa Kulam was a bit of fairyland,
a great tank inclosed in a striped red and white
stone parapet, with a dazzling marble platform in
its center upholding the most fanciful little white
coroneted temple, the glorified pavilion of a con-
fectioner's dreams, four mites of lesser pavilions re-
flected from each corner of the platform. We drove
down shady lanes, past the elephant stables, to the
garden of the English judge to see the great banian
tree, whose main trunk, over seventy feet in circum-
ference, is surrounded by a hundred lesser trunks
and newly rooted filaments — a leafy hall of columns,
measuring one hundred and eighty feet across.

We went to the spacious Moorish and Hindu sev-
enteenth-century palace of the great ruler, Tirumala
Nayak, and after a small boy of the neighbor-
hood had taken us in charge and scolded, stamped
liis foot, and pushed an old gray-haired sweeper
about, that abject being produced the keys and ad-
mitted us to cool, shadowy halls and council-cham-
bers with richly carved and paneled ceilings, to the
king's bedchamber, where a carved and gilded bed
once swung by chains from latticed ceilings, and
down whose chains the clever thief slid to steal the
crown jewels; and from the terraced roof where the
prime minister used to dwell we saw the whole,

TIIK, fllvKAT Cdl'UK.V. MAOflJA TKMI'I.K.

ON INDIA'S CORAL STRAND 15

flat-roofed city with the great gopuras, or temple
gateways, standing like so many Gibraltars in its
midst.

These gopuras loom and dwindle away toward the
sky in such a way as to make all things seem toys,
and the people pygmies. One such monument would
be architectural fame for any city, but Madura's
rich shrine is protected by nine such soaring, py-
ramidal sky-scrapers, the four in the outer wall nine
stories in height. These most ornamental of de-
fensive constructions begin with door-posts of single
stones, sixty feet in height, and rise, course upon
course, carved with rows of gods and goddesses, pea-
cocks, Hulls, elephants, horses, lions, and a bewilder-
ing entanglement of symbolical ornament all colored
and gilded, diminishing with distance until the
stone trisul at the top, two hundred and fifty feet
in air, looks like the finest jeweler's work. This
great shrine of Shiva and his fish-eyed consort is a
labyrinth where one easily wanders a whole morn-
ing. The anteroom or vestibule of the temple is a
long hall or choltry, an open pavilion divided by
four rows of most elaborately carved columns, where
the king used to receive the annual visits of Shiva —
a miserable little black image. Neither kings nor
idols occupied it then, but a legion of shopkeepers
were gathered there, who vaunted their goods and
pushed their wares upon us with fury and zeal —
cloth, cotton, lace, brass, glass, perfumes, incense,
and fruits. One spectacled merchant was casting up
his accounts in a ledger made of strips of talipot
palm leaves, an orthodox fashion as old as writing.

16 WINTER INDIA

Others pressed upon us pieces of filmy, gold-bor-
dered Madras muslins, eight yards of which are re-
quired for a turban or a woman's sari. There were
none of the ancient India muslins, those "floating
mists," or ''webs of the air," of which one has
heard but never sees in this day of Manchester piece
goods, steam-mills, and spindles.

Our Tamil servant, being a Christian, would not
enter the heathen temple, so consigned us to a high-
caste Brahman draped superbly in a white sheet,
and striped between his eyebrows with the frown-
ing mark of Shiva. Inside the temple compound,
every forehead was freshly painted, breasts and
arms striped and smeared with other hall-marks of
piety. The black images were streaming with oil
and butter, garlanded with chains of marigolds, and
surrounded by abject worshipers. In that temple
one may fully realize what heathenism and idolatry
really are. One meets there the India of the Sun-
day-school books, and is appalled with the seeming
hopelessness of the missionary's task, of the impos-
sibility of ever making any impression upon such a
people, of coping with such superstition. Yet the
American Mission in Madura is one of the largest
and most successful in India, and in this southern
presidency one fifth of the people are Christians.
Whole villages even are Christian, Syrian, Nestorian,
and early Jesuit missionaries having labored there
since the third and fourth centuries.

We could look down dark temple corridors to
darker shrines, where faint lights glimmered and
the highest-caste Brahmans were tending the images

ON INDIA'S CORAL STRAND 17

of Shiva and Minakshi. Every May these idols are
paraded in state to another part of the temple, and
the gold and silver chariots and palanquins, the
jeweled elephant trappings, and all the treasury of
gems belonging to the shrine are brought to light.
The Madura temple jewels are among the finest in
southern India, and one sees them by special permit,
and afterward pays a fee for the cleansing of the
jewels. Despite the rupees and rupees that pour in
during the cold-weather season of tourists' defile-
ment, no one has ever seen the famous sapphires
and big pearls when they were not greasy and
gummed over from much tourist and Brahman
handling. Other famous treasures are a ruby-covered
scepter, three feet long ; several pairs of golden shoes
and gauntlets coated with rubies ; and a head-dress
fringed with tallow-drop emeralds.

The famous Hall of a Thousand Columns does not
contain nearly that many columns or carved pillars,
and, despite the miracle of stone- worker 's art lav-
ished on them, and Fergusson's praises, it was dis-
appointing. The tank in the heart of the labyrinth,
a water court or quadrangle, was most picturesque
with the crowds descending the steps to purify them-
selves in the water, where broken reflections of the
great gopuras wavered across the thick and oily
liquid. Sacred elephants came shuffling across sunny
courts, their bells, swinging by long ropes over their
embroidered trappings, clanging an alarum. Hav-
ing returned from the river with the gold lotas filled
with water for the daily bath of the goddess, they
stood at ease in a shady hall, swinging their painted

18 WINTER INDIA

trunks and shifting their weight from one foot to the
other. At the word of command, the hugest of them
tossed his trunk in salute, made a court courtesy,
and, nosing the ground, picked up the tiniest silver
three-anna piece. The elephants flicked their flanks
with fly-brushes of green twigs as they stood guard
benignly over the hall where jewelers were hammer-
ing, welding, and carving gold and silver ornaments.
Veiled women sat around a merchant of cheaper
gauds, who, with a small prentice boy, cracked or
filed off the old bracelets and soldered on the new.

It was then ten o'clock in the morning, the heat
was terrific, the sun blinding, and we had spent five
busy hours abroad. The dak bangla was an asylum
of coolness and shade, and after a bountiful tiffin the
keeper presented his account-book, we entered the
items, added up the bill, and settled our score with
the British government in India. The keeper bowed
profoundly, and wished the "ladyships" a good
health, when a fee had gon,e his way; and then, in
strict order of social precedence, the cook and the
coolie, the sweeper, the water-carrier, and what not,
presented themselves, bowing, at different doors.
They rubbed their palms upward across their faces,
extended them to us, wobbling their fingers as if
gathering grains of rice, and whined: "Prissint!
Prissint! Memsahib!" We gave to each one, and,
without stopping to bow or to thank us, each one
looked greedily into the other's palm and went away
loudly wrangling— a first encounter with the most
cringing, graceless, shameless tribe of alms-seekers
in all the world.

OKTAIl. OF GiirrKA, MAOriA ri:MlM 1.

CHAPTER II

TRICHINOPOIJ AND TANJORE

E rumbled and jolted along all that
hot afternoon over a monotonous, dry
brown plain of parched fields and
thorn hedges. There was uproar in
the forward part of the train as it
left Dindigal station, a hundred voices clamored
and shrieked, and a hundred heads hung from
the windows of the third-class cars. The train
halted, men leaped from it and ran back, while all
on the station platform ran up the track toward a
small object beside the rails. The station-master
came on toward the train, holding fast to a lean
little black imp, who was struggling to release him-
self and fairly bursting with wrath. An excited
woman, wailing and declaiming with uncovered face,
leaned from a forward car window, talking to an ex-
cited group on the ground. At last, an oily babu
came to tell us that the small boy had "had a dis-
pute with his mother," and, not wishing to leave
Dindigal, had jumped out of the window. "His
fearful mother had thought him killed," said the
babu, but at sight of the lost heir her fear gave way
to fury. She raved and ranted like an Indian Bern-
hardt as she leaned from the window, unveiled, talk-

21

22 WINTER INDIA

ing to the station officers ; and the small boy talked
back to everybody, until he was suddenly lifted by
the back, like a kitten, and handed through the win-
dow to "his fearful mother's" arms. "Because of
his youth they will not arrest him, ' ' said the babu ;
and, from the shrieks that came from that compart-
ment, there was no need for the law to add aught
to the chastisement of the barefaced, nose-ringed
mother.

We were in the heart of the tobacco country, and
Trichinopoli in these modern days is as much a
synonym for cheroots as Dindigal. Samuel Daniel,
the local guide, who claimed us in the darkness of
Trichinopoli station, had the advertisement of his
own cigar factory on the back of his card, and every-
where we saw and smelled the local cheroot. We slept
in the travelers' rooms in the Trichinopoli station,
after dining at a table trailed over with bougain-
villea vines and set with glasses of great double hibis-
cus. Trains rumbled by all night, the mosquitos
sang a deafening chorus, and at sunrise we sped
across another city of dirty white houses, whose in-
habitants were just waking and scratching, and
whose Brahman families were marking the door-sills
and themselves for the day, the houses' toilet as
necessary as their own.

The rock of Trichinopoli, exactly as it looked in
old geography pictures, loomed ahead; and after a
few turns in the narrow streets we came to the
carved entrance of the staircase, tunneled up through
the solid rock to temples on the side and summit.
Two elephants went past on their way to the river

TRICHINOPOLI AND TANJORE 23

to fill the sacred water-vessels, and we started to
climb the two hundred and ninety steps worn slip-
pery with the tread of generations of barefooted
worshipers and painted with the perpendicular red
and white stripes of Shiva, Our elderly, pompous
guide was voluble, measured, and minute, and per-
mitted no trifling nor omissions. Samuel Daniel
talked like Samuel Johnson, using the grandiloquent,
polysyllabic literary language of the eighteenth cen-
tury. We had engaged him to show us the sights,
and he did it thoroughly. "Here is the place where
many hundreds of people were crushed to death in
the dark of the afternoon of a festival in 1849," he
said. Since then, the British government has cut
windows in the rock, placed lamps, and forbidden
climbing after four o'clock. At one landing we
found a group of little boys sitting before a greasy,
black image of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god,
receiving instruction from a Brahman teacher; at
another landing a high priest stood statuesque in
yellow robes, the sacred white Brahman thread and
bead on his neck, his forehead smeared with ashes;
and at last we came out to the air at a small shrine
on an outer shelf of the rock, where Ave had a far-
reaching view of the level plain. After one more
tunnel staircase we gained the open summit, climbed
a last pinnacle, and found ourselves two hundred
and thirty-six feet above the city, that lay like a
relief -map at our feet, the fortress-like gopuras of
the Srirangam temples rising from green groves
southward, A little temple to Ganesha crowns the
rock, the goal of the breathless pilgrimage. Half-

24 WINTER INDIA

way down the staircase, we were deafened by the
flutes and flageolets of the priests and flag-bearers
toiling up with water-jars just brought from the
river. The sacred elephants at the foot of the stairs
saluted us with lifted fore feet and waving trunks,
rubbing their foreheads as they begged, plainly de-
manding a "prissint," after the custom of the
country.

It was a short drive of three miles down to the
temple of Vishnu at Srirangam, on an island in the
dry bed of the Kaveri. This, the largest temple in
southern India, is on a magnificent scale, its fifteen
gopuras so many marvels of architecture ; the great-
est of them falling short of its intended three hun-
dred feet by the interruption of building during
the French and English wars of the eighteenth cen-
tury, when the French intrenched themselves at Sri-
rangam and mounted cannon on the gopuras. The
outer, inclosing wall of the temple measures three
thousand feet each way, and within that lies a first
quadrangle of bazaars. A second gopura admits to
a quadrangle where the three thousand high-caste
Brahmans of the temple dwell. We drove on through
a third and a fourth gopura, in one passage disputing
right of way with a temple elephant, who backed out
before our brougham, and, Avith the courtesy of a
well-bred creature, swept his trunk and lifted a fore
foot in apology. The last gateway had great teak
doors, and the doctor of the temple and director of
the Srirangam government hospital met us there;
also the council of priests and five huge elephants,
their foreheads striped with the same yellow and

TRICHINOPOLI AND TANJORE 25

white tridents of Vishnu as their piously frescoed
keepers. We saw the famous Hall of the Horse Col-
umns, where single blocks of granite are as intricately
carved as wood or ivory, and we saw the other curi-
osities of the stone-cutter's art, serried columns dis-
playing the many incarnations of Vishnu. We saw,
too, the Hall of a Thousand Columns — nine hundred
odd shabby, whitewashed pillars only— and from the
roof we were given a glimpse of the golden cupola
covering the shrine of the sacred image— the identi-
cal image brought by Rama in the age of fable, and
which grew fast to the ground when left for a
moment. They were then preparing for the great
mela or festival of early December, when forty
thousand pilgrims assemble, crowds spending day
and night in the temple for three weeks.

We were shown to a last pavilion, given arm-
chairs before a table, the five elephants were sta-
tioned in line across the entrance, and fierce-fore-
headed Brahmans multiplied. Strings of keys
clanged on the table, five clumsy wooden chests were
lugged in, five padlocks yielded to blows and
wrenches, and the table was heaped with riches ; the
feast of jewels was spread, and a flood of color and
light illuminated the shadowy, pavilion. Gold armor
and ornaments and utensils incrusted with jewels
were heaped on the table and handed us to examine,
until one wondered if any more rubies, emeralds, sap-
phires, diamonds, or pearls were left in southern In-
dia. Gold helmets, crowns, breastplates, gauntlets,
brassards, belts, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, were
sown with rubies of thumb-nail size, with sapphires

26 WINTER INDIA

and diamonds seeded between, and fringed with
pearls and uncut emeralds. Plain gold salvers, water-
bottles, gourds, and bowls had neither value nor in-
terest in our eyes after the play of gems. Even the
Prince of Wales's gold salver, inscribed "Dec. 11th,
1875, " to commemorate his visit to the temple, seemed
dull and commonplace. Far better was the gold
breastplate fringed with tallow-drop emeralds, which
he also gave as a souvenir of his visit to this great
shrine of Vishnu. There were several Vishnu tri-
dents in diamonds, and jeweled feathers trembling
with diamond fringes; turban ornaments in which
jeweled birds held great drops of rubies and emeralds
in their beaks ; a jeweled umbrella-stick with an inch-
long sapphire for its ferrule, a crust of rubies for its
handle, and a fringe of tinkling bo-leaves edged with
pearls. Four great wings of head-ornaments cov-
ered with jewels had been given by a pious beggar,
who had gathered more than fifty thousand rupees
in alms to spend for such gifts to the gods and gauds
for the temple, his stones better cut and set and of
better quality than any others in the treasury.
Strings and strings of pearls— pearls strung alone
or alternating with balls of emerald, ruby, or carved
gold— slipped through our hands to weariness. Our
eyes were sated with splendor and color when, as a
climax, they produced a fine bit of gold carving,
representing a religious procession, the idol in the
state chair cut from a large ruby, the tiny face, the
drapery, and the many ornaments most cleverly
done.

It was a characteristic and a picturesque scene

TRICHINOPOLI AND TANJORE 29

there under the mandapan, the riches of India laid
out on a dirty cotton table-cover !— the wise elephants
a contrast in good manners to the horde of noisy
and excited Brahmans. Although it had required
the intervention of three officials to permit us to see
the jewels, and each chest is locked with five keys
and sealed with five seals of that many Brahman
keepers, thefts are frequent, and fifty thousand
rupees' worth of jewels vanished at one time. The
police kept their eyes on each of the priestly band,
the elephants blinked and watched too ; and when we
had offered our rupees to clean the jewels, the
Brahmans set up an approving shout, dropped gar-
lands of marigolds around our necks, and presented
us with fragrant lemons. We rose to go, and the
most gaudily painted and blackest old Brahman of
them all pushed forward, shouting: "I want my pho-
tograph now. You have it in that box. You took
it an hour ago. I am Venketerama lyenzar, revenue
inspector of Srirangam. Send it to me by the
post." And with the elephants trumpeting and
nosing for two-anna pieces in the dust, we drove
away to the silk and silver and muslin shops of
**Trichi," as one soon learns to call it. There the
lahsildar spied our brougham, and, descending from
his bullock-cart, paid us a visit at the silk merchant's
shop front— the courteous, gracious old tahsildar,
a fine product of two civilizations.

Samuel Daniel, our guide with the tobacco fac-
tory attached, was radiant with the success of the
whole morning. Elated from his converse with
Brahmans, doctors, and tahsildar, he dropped so

30 WINTER INDIA

much architectural and historical information about
Chidambram, Conjeveram, and Mahabalipur, that
we said : ' ' Why, you must have read Fergusson ? ' '

"Yes, your ladyship. I have the book. Ten
rupees. ' '

"Then you had better go with us as guide."

"Yes, your ladyship," and he went and made our
way so plain, so smooth and interesting, that we com-
pared all other guides in India with him to their
detriment.

A Catholic priest in cool white robes tiffined also
at the station, and told of some of the great successes
in mission work in the south; how whole villages
have become Christian when the priest permits them
to retain their caste. "It is among our converts, or
in places where we have worked before them, that
your Protestant missionaries have most success," he
said.

From the rock of Trichinopoli we had seen the
great pagoda tower of Tanjore on the horizon, and
as we rumbled the thirty miles across the Kaveri
plain in the early, showery afternoon it rose in
height as we advanced, and the train stopped fairly
in its shadow. Leaving David to watch the luggage
at the station, Samuel Daniel hurried us to the
temple gate and under the two gopuras to the striped
inner court, where the thirteen-story vimana, or
tower, of Shiva tapers away until its great trisul
seems to touch the very sky.

"Ah ! you see here the cleverosity of the OKI World
builders and the numerosity of their carvings," said
Daniel, proudly.

TRICHINOPOLI AND TANJORE 31

After the French occupied tlie temple as a fortress
in 1777, it was never purified or sanctified again, and
the deserted court was a contrast to the other temples
we had seen. Two barefooted priests slipped silently
across an angle of the cloisters, the colossal stone
bull crouched under its grease and garlands, and
only the fluttering parrakeets gave any sign or sound
of life to the vast inclosure. We gazed in wonder-
ment at the court, the tower, and the exquisite little
temple of Subrahmanya, the martial son of Shiva, on
whose steps we met two glib, sightseeing babus, who
began at once to upbraid us for the proselytizing
work of the missionaries. The one with the largest
Vishnu mark on his brow had graduated as a civil en-
gineer at Calcutta University, but the exact sciences
had not taught him to disbelieve in greasy images,
or opened his eyes to any absurdities in his creed,
and his torrent of words came like the flow of a
phonograph. "Why do you come here to destroy
our religion?" he pattered. I denied the charge.
"Why do you wish us to give up our gods for your
gods?" I denied the plural, and after the twittering
parrakeet had followed us awhile, we left him shout-
ing the rest of his set speech to the empty court.

It was a rest to find one heathen temple deserted,
to be spared the oily Brahman guide, and to trace
in peace the details of this most beautiful of Dra-
vidian temples, the purest example of that style.
The great vimana, or pagoda, thirteen stories in
height, mounts like the gopuras of Madura, course
upon course, carved over with figures and ornaments,
two hundred feet to the ball at the peak— a granite

32 WINTER INDIA

mass weighing more than twelve tons, and which
could have been placed there only by rolling it up
an inclined plane more than a mile in length. In
repairing the tower a few centuries ago, the sculptors
introduced a face in one floral medallion that was not
of any Hindu type. The local prophets said that it
wore the features of the people who would conquer
India, and it is easily recognized now as an admir-
able portrait of John Bright. We found Flaxman's
beautiful tablet to the memory of Schwartz in the
church where the great missionary preached. The
church faces a tank where picturesque files of women
with brass jars on their heads went up and down four
separate flights of terrace steps, each for a special
caste.

The elephants, which are kept "for the honor and
glory of the palace," now that rajas ride in landaus
and automobiles, were swaying uneasily at their
posts in the palace courtyard, trumpeting and toss-
ing trunk-loads of leaves and straw on their backs.
We were shown the black and white marble durbar
hall of the palace, and the library full of illuminated
Persian books, and of precious Tamil manuscripts
written on strips of palm leaves. When we had wan-
dered through all the inner courts, such a train of
guides, lackeys, ushers, keepers, sweepers, porters,
and gardeners fawned with extended palms that even
Samuel Daniel Avas dismayed, laid the coins on the
flagstones, and walked away from the ensuing scene
of combat. We were just in time to see the mahouts
scramble to the elephants' necks as a fanfare of
trumpets and two scarlet lancers heralded a landau

TRICHINOPOLI AND TANJORE 33

holding two pale yellow, heavily jeweled grandchil-
dren of the raja returning from a drive. A bearer
with a red umbrella ran after them, the elephants
saluted with trunk and foot, and the sad-faced
princelings disappeared in the palace.

The railway station was as deserted as the temple
court in the late afternoon, and M'e had the table
brought out to the platform and enjoyed tea in the
open air. A white tramp, a pure specimen of the
genus hobo, the only one of his kind encountered in
India, appeared silently with : "You are a European
like myself, lady. Please give me a few rupees to get
to Tuticorin." David and Daniel came running in
alarm, and hastily swept table, books, chairs, and
ourselves inside the refreshment-room and banged
the doors, and the beery beggar slunk away to the
native bazaar. The butler was decorating his white
dinner-cloth with interlacing arabesques of black
seeds dropped from a funnel, after which he arranged
finger-bowls filled Avith black-eyed marigolds among
his traceries and stood off to admire the effect.
Again and again we marveled that the Hindu, with
his gross stupidities and incompetencies, had yet
been able so thoroughly to master the intricacies
of an English dinner, the decoration of the table,
the procession of the courses, the ceremony and de-
corum of it all, with little of the incongruity and
inequalities, the mixed splendor and shabbiness, that
mark everything of the Hindu's own.

CHAPTER III

WITH chidambram's brahmans

was our fine old Tamil Turveydrop,
Samuel Daniel, who induced us to visit
Chidambram after we had abandoned
it i-n favor of Conjeveram, where the
temple was said to be richer, the jewels
more splendid. This artful one pictured "the clever-
osity and numerosity of the sculptures," also "the
numberlesses of the goddesses and the beauteousness
of the temple's dancers, which makes it so popular
for visitors," and our interest revived.

As necessary precedent to every move one makes
in India, enough telegrams were sent to negotiate a
treaty. We wired the Chidambram station-master to
have conveyances ready the next midnight to take
us the three miles to the dak bangla. We wired the
bangla-keeper that we were coming, two beds strong.
We informed the local magistrate and the high
priest that we wished to make an offering to the
temple and to celebrate in honor of the goddess with
a great dance in the Hall of a Thousand Columns
and to see the famous temple jewels. Last, we be-
sought the section superintendent of the railway to
reserve a compartment in the next midnight train
that would bear us away from Chidambram.

34

WITH CHIDAMBRAM'S BRAHMANS 35

With the remoteness and seeming isolation among
the black faces one has no fear or concern in these
Hindu communities, trusting implicitly to that safety
and order guaranteed one wherever the British flag
floats and Kaiscr-i-Hind's initial letters grace offi-
cial property. Else, when we stepped out on the
lonely platform at Chidambram that rainy midnight,
we would have thought twice before picking our way
through sleeping pilgrims in the open waiting-room,
and stowing ourselves away with every joint bent
in a tiny box of a native cart, or "lie-down-bandy,"
for the ride into unknown blackness beyond. Daniel
compressed himself with David and the larger lug-
gage bundles into another small box on wheels, and
the ponies spattered down a muddy road in the black
shadows of overarching trees. Our driver had no
turban, his hair was long and snaky, and the jerky
motion of the bandy, and the driver's frequent
flights out over the shafts to lead the pony by the
bridle over bridges and around corners, sent those
locks rippling down his l^ack— and my back, too, as
I sat hatless, crouched flat on the bandy floor behind
him. After what seemed a long race through the
reek and blackness, past sodden fields and through
dreary mud hamlets, we came in under the shadows
of the great trees surrounding the dak bangla.

With the abrupt reining up we slid out, or fell
out, of the bandbox of a bandy, and our cramped
members slowly jointed out straight again. Knocks,
thumps, and calls brought no response from t^¥0
front doors, and there was an uncanny quarter-hour
of waiting before the swaying lantern of Daniel and

36 WINTER INDIA

David's bandy turned in at the gates— and yet an-
other eerie quarter of an hour while the bandy
drivers muttered in the near darkness, and our two
protectors pounded and shouted at a far-away door.
The moon struggled out in rare glimpses and gave
us suggestion now and then of a great lawn and trees,
a long, low, white building whose eaves extended
over a continuous flagged porch— the regulation rest-
house built by government for the use of traveling
officials and other Europeans.

A babel of angry voices came from the back of
the compound, the loud talk and back talk, the in-
cessant wrangle and jangle of untuned bells and
Hindu servants, the most quarrelsome lower class
in the world, after the Chinese. Their bickerings are
an annoyance that frets the spirit and wears the
nerves of the most adamantine traveler, and it is
no wonder that the Buddha, and all saints and re-
formers, first fled to the jungle for years of silent
meditation. The keeper of the bangla appeared with
his keys and a lantern. "Oh, yes, certingly, mem-
sahib, ' ' he had received the telegram in due time and
had tightly locked up the bangla and his own quar-
ters and gone soundly to sleep— Hindu irresponsi-
bility, ungraciousness, and indifference to the usual
degree.

The door clanged open and showed us the regu-
lation lofty, cheerless, cement-floored room, as fit for
prison as superior occupancy. One remembered
those creepy "other stories" of Rudyard Kipling
where lunatics and delirium tremens subjects hab-
ited, and suicides took themselves off in, just such

WITH CHIDAMBRAM'S BRAHMANS 37

cheerless rooms, and that other more grisly story of
the dead man concealed on rafters overhead in just
such a forlorn place. The candles burning sullenly
in tall glass bells showed us a great dining-table,
ponderous arm-chairs and lounging-chair, and a
broad cane-seated settee for a bed. Another such
hygienic couch of the country was brought in
from a black, echoing room beyond, and the ser-
vants spread out our red razais, or wadded calico
quilts, which every traveler in India must carry
with him as bedding and covering, just as the
Klondike miner carries his blankets when he "hits
the trail." The rubber pillows were inflated, and
the apartment was completely furnished and in
order for occupancy. Before the alcohol lamp had
boiled the water for the beef-tea of our midnight
feast, the servants were snoring on the flags of the
portico, lying on the door-mats with only a thin bit
of dhurrie covering them, despite all one hears of
the deadly effect of night air and the chill before the
dawn. The most awful stillness succeeded, a silence
that made one's ears ring, hushed our voices, and
made us unconsciously put down spoons and cups
noiselessly. No one had raised my terrors then with
tales of the still occasionally existent thugs of
southern India, of thieves who throttle by night and
stealthily kill or maim an unbeliever as an act ac-
ceptable to Kali and the other destroying divinities.
The situation was all novel and amusing, and the
poverty-stricken interior, the forlorn banquet-hall of
this Waldorf of the neighborhood, furnished all the
real color one could want. The stealthy dripping

145320

38 WINTER INDIA

of the trees told of another gentle shower, and the
steady snoring on the porch was as comforting and
hypnotic as the purring of a home cat by the hearth
— sufficient assurance that all was well at one o'clock
and that the British government in India still lived
and protected us.

At seven o'clock repeated calls brought no answer
from the portico ; the silence of broad daylight was
more complete than that of midnight. The flagstones
were deserted, and not a sign of life appeared on
either side of the bangla. David and Daniel had
most literally taken up their beds and walked — far
away beyond hearing. A little girl with a nose-ring
crept out and looked at us, another one joined her,
and the two stared and smiled, nodded their nose-
rings with friendly flops, and looked their fill— a
steady, continuous, fascinated scrutiny — for a whole
half-hour before David and Daniel appeared bearing
tea and toast. Then David's irate voice rose in
volume, well-sweeps creaked and tubs were filled,
chickens ran cackling, smoke rose and sounds of life
and cheer came from the keeper's house and kitchen.
David wrathfully told how he had had to go to the
village bazaar, a mile away, to get even the firewood
to cook the first breakfast.

While David ruled in the primitive mud kitchen
the keeper of the bangla laid the table on the front
portico, overlooking the broad, glistening green
lawn, where squirrels frisked and little green par-
rots squawked and flew about. The china, glass,
and cutlery provided at these dak banglas are always
good, and there is usually some attempt at splendor

WITH CHIDAMBRAM'S BRAHMAN8 39

in electroplated toast-racks and marmalade-stands.
Our esthetic keeper of Chidambram put a great
bouquet of yellow crysanthemums on the table, but
the tablecloth was a thick honeycomb stuff, either a
bed-spread or a bath-towel that some guest had left
behind; and it was frescoed with hospitable records
of a useful past in egg, coffee, and claret stains on a
ground toned by the roadside's red dust of a season.

The local magistrate appeared for a morning call,
entering the gates in a large bullock-bandy, or cov-
ered cart, drawn by two magnificent white bul-
locks with humps on their shoulders, the bells on
their necks announcing the pace of their leisurely
trot. The turbaned and white-draperied grandee
had hardly descended from this seeming vehicle of
state or chariot of religious ceremony when the
driver loosened the yoke, tilted the bandy over, and
turned the splendid creatures loose to graze on the
lawn. This custom of southern India, of releasing
bullocks and ponies of their harness at once, gives
hotel and bangla grounds in the Madras Presidency
always a homely look, suggestive alike of pasture,
race-course, and stable-yard.

The magistrate was one of the finer types of high-
caste Hindu, who added to his own Brahmanic cul-
ture and inherited refinement an English university
education and acquaintance with other ways of liv-
ing and thinking. He had all the Oriental suavity
and graceful address, and talked with us two of the
despised sex quite on a social equality. He sat long
at his ease, commenting upon the customs of his peo-
ple and the peculiarities of life and architecture in

40 WINTER INDIA

southern India. He deplored the low estate and
want of education among women ; praised the new
era and the blessings of British rule, the good roads,
schools, hospitals, and things not dreamed of before,
that had come with the Western education, which
had only begun to reach the mass of the people. His
Western education had not, however, steeled him to
shaking hands with a casteless unbeliever, and he
kept tables and chairs between us as he rose to go.

"I must go and hurry up the priests," said the
suave judicial. "Since they know you cannot leave
until midnight, they will not try to be ready before
late afternoon. At one o'clock I will send my bandy
and peon for you. You will find my bullocks faster
than those you would get from the bazaar." And
with more beautiful speeches about the honor of our
visit to Chidambram and our appreciation of Dra-
vidian art, he backed and bowed himself away to
his bandy, with furtive glances lest we yet lay de-
filing hand on him, and send him through all the
details of his morning toilet again, as the least of
ills.

It was past one o'clock when the stately l5ulloeks
again tinkled down the road to the bangla ; a peon
with a broad sash and metal plate on his breast
forming an escort of honor. There was no telling
how much our occupancy defiled the magistrate's
bandy while we progressed magnificently along a
shaded road, between garnered fields and the lines of
mud houses constituting villages— mud houses with
mud floors, and mud porticos or shelves where the
occupants loll by day and sleep at night. Men and

WITH CHIDAMBRAM'S BRAHMANS 41

women gave friendly looks, the women draped grace-
fully in the single long sari, or winding-cloth, that,
either red or white, is a foil to the dark skin and
lends majesty and picturesqueness to the frowziest.
Nearly every woman wore silver bracelets and ank-
lets, armlets, finger-rings, ear-rings, nose-rings, and
necklaces past counting, and one never knows what
silver jewelry can effect, nor its artistic value, until
he sees it against these sooty Tamil skins.

The village of Chidambram clusters low before the
soaring gopura of this oldest Shivaite temple of the
south, and its seventy rest-houses shelter thousands
of pilgrims at every December mela. Four of these
great pagoda-like structures, each 160 feet in height,
carved, painted, and gilded over, with a massive
trisul, or trident ornament of Shiva, for capstone,
admit to the quadrangular space of thirty-two acres
occupied by the labyrinth of shrines and courts and
halls around the great tank. The temple was built
a thousand years ago by a pious raja, who had seen
Shiva and Parvati dancing on the near-by sea-shore ;
and the holy of holies is a golden shrine dedicated
to the god of dancing. Another tradition says that
a Kashmir prince of the fifth century brought three
thousand Brahmans with him from the north and
founded the temple. The greatest popularity was
given the temple when "the golden-colored em-
peror," a leper prince who had come south on a
pilgrimage, was cured by bathing in the temple tank,
and thousands emulate him every year.

Repairs were being executed in many places, at
tht» instance of a pious Hindu of Madras, and we

42 WINTER INDIA

picked our way through damp and dripping courts
littered with freshly carved stones, crawled under
scaffoldings and inclined planks, until we were well
confused with the multiplicity of shrines, the gar-
landed and greased images of Shiva, Parvati, Gane-
sha, and the Bull, and always the figure of the danc-
ing god with one knee acutely bent and the other foot
flung with abandon. The courts were empty, the
shrines deserted, no worshipers, no workmen, no
priests, no crowd of idlers, as in the busy Madura
and Srirangam temples. No signs of preparation
for our visit were evident, and we sent the peon and
Daniel and lay brethren in hot haste to give the
alarm, lest the function be delayed past sunset. A
few languid villagers stole in and stared, the longi-
tudinal sect-mark of Vishnu on the forehead and the
loosely drawn dhotee drapery around their shoulders
giving them a strong resemblance to our red Indians
of the prairies in war-paint and reservation blankets.
Then more Avaiting succeeded, more messengers were
despatched with more vehement advices, and Daniel,
with the air of great cares pressing on him, paced
the arcades meditating, speaking now and then with
magnificent gestures, like a real raja. "My birthly
is Christian," he had informed us in the first sanctu-
ary of heathendom, that we might feel free to com-
ment and question at will.

A band of Brahmans in fresh war-paint finally
arrived, and their fierce hawk-like gaze, their eager,
excited, hurried air, might have given one qualms of
alarm at our isolation in this labyrinthine fortress
of a temple, remote from any European settlement,

WITH CHIDAMBRAM'S BRAHMANS 45

and miles from a white official or any pale-face. But
Daniel reassured one by his calm magnificence, his
grandiloquent phrases and evident pride in the
amazing spectacle which he, as grand impresario,
was about to present. Three hundred of these high-
est-caste Dikshatar Brahmans, or priestly ones, de-
scended from a first Cholukyan king, they say, live
with their families within the temple inclosure. All
are rich, enjoying inherited wealth and the great
income which this popular temple derives from its
votaries and pilgrims. There were fine, intelligent
faces among them, and, barring the disfigurement
of the painted sect-mark on the forehead, one could
easily appreciate how much finer is the type and the
cast of countenance of these long-descended aris-
tocrats than the common Hindu face seen in bazaars
and street crowds. All had fine, straight noses, level
brows, and well-formed heads, the hair shaved all
around the edges as though for a Chinese queue, and
then drawn and knotted at the side behind the
left ear, precisely as small children in north China
twist their locks. All wore the white dhotee, twisted
as a skirt around the body, left nude to the waist,
save as one and another chose to fling the end of the
long cloth over the head and shoulders as protec-
tion from the alternating sun and rain. The sacred
white cord over one shoulder and the carved Brah-
man bead on a thread around the neck were the only
other bits of apparel worn, although each one car-
ried, in a twist of the girdle, a silver or brass box
filled with the ashes of sandalwood or the dung of
the sacred cow, with which to paint the caste- and

46 WINTER INDIA

sect-marks on their brows. Generations of superior
folk, carefully nurtured, highly educated and cul-
tivated in Brahman lore, have produced these splen-
did specimens of their race, these fine intellectual
faces and athletic bodies overlaid Avith dark-brown
skin of a grain and patina finer than any inani-
mate bronze — aristocrats of thirty centuries' direct
descent.

They looked at us, their prey, with eager interest,
and with shouts appropriate to those about to offer
living sacrifice to the gods; with whoops and hur-
rahs this band of Brahmans conducted us to the
main shrine and struck the gong to announce our
presence to the god— an ugly, greasy, black little
image, hidden somewhere out of sight in an inner-
most sanctuary. We saw only an open- fronted
chapel, whose floor was three or four feet above the
level of the court-yard ; and as we advanced to it
the priests brought gold plates heaped wath garlands
of strung flowers, which they flung around our necks.
The gold plate was extended for our ofl^erings, and
at sight of the rupees of propitiation the Brahmans
pushed, pointed, gesticulated, and shouted to one
another. Only the Arabs of the Nile, or the boat-
women of Canton, could raise sucli din and hulla-
baloo, produce such waves and volumes of harsh,
ear-splitting sounds. It seemed as if they were about
to tear us to pieces and were quarreling about the
lead, but it was only intense interest, pleased excite-
ment, and glee at the prospect of another gala day
for (^hidambram, with a flne lot of rupees to be
divided afterward among the charter members of the

WITH CHIDAMBRAM'S BRAHMANS 47

close corporation. They shouted, screamed, pushed,
and all but defiled themselves by touching us, in
order to point out things to us and attract attention.
A half-dozen tried to be leaders of the expedition,
to establish a special protectorate over us, each lead-
ing a separate way, the magistrate's peon making
appealing dumb show for us to follow him in an-
other direction, while Daniel, disentangling himself
from the Brahman mob, made deprecatory gestures
to them, bowed low to us, swept his hand obsequiously
to guide us in a still different quarter, and said in
mild, honeyed tones: "This way, your ladyships,
this way." His suavity won, and all garlanded, as
if ready for slaughter, and preceded by the band of
temple musicians, we were led on and on, from shrine
to shrine, the hawk-eyed Brahmans shouting wild
acclaims, just as in a triumphant progress on the
stage. It was all well-mounted grand opera, a deaf-
ening Wagnerian representation ; and when we stood
with the great chorus grouped before one gilded
shrine with a golden roof and a golden flag-staff —
a mainmast plated with hammered gold — it was a
fine scene for the curtain to have fallen on. They led
us to a store-room full of silver palanquins, chariots
and platforms, silver bulls, elephants, goats, and pea-
cocks, and explained how these and the sacred images
are drawn in procession through Chidambram streets
and courts on the great days of the heathen year.
There the temple musicians fought and won chance
for fullest action ; and drum, trumpets, and castanets
raised such echoing din in the holy inelosure that we
were literally distracted when, having ''visited the

48 WINTER INDIA

architectures, "we were conducted to the treasury and
given chairs around a long, low table covered with a
greasy red-silk cover. Deafened by the thump and
blast of instruments and the vent of sacerdotal lungs,
and overpowered by the weight and suffocating odors
of the garlands of jasmine, tuberoses, marigolds,
and chrysanthemums around our necks, we let those
twenty-pound weights of vegetable adornments slip
on to the backs of the chairs, and had Daniel hint to
the Brahmans that our presents to the temple would
be greater if the noise were less. He explained deli-
cately that we were from another country than that
of the usual visitors to Chidambram ; that people in
America were accustomed to speak in soft, low voices,
and to keep very silent in their temples. What a
Talleyrand was spoiled when that soul in its present
incarnation habited the body of Trichinopoli 's great
guide ! Daniel spoke, and the hush of midnight suc-
ceeded for about ten seconds. Then the Brahmans
whispered ; their buzz rose to audible speech, and our
ear-drums were again violently beaten until the
mercenary company was hushed by significant ges-
tures from Daniel. The musicians fingered their
instruments sadly, but Daniel was supreme, and
when one strapping head Brahman fully caught the
cue, he outdid Daniel in silencing the sacerdotal
screamers for the rest of the afternoon.

When the magistrate came, followed by temple
peons bearing great boxes tied up in red silk, he
brought with him his six-year-old daughter, Thun-
gama, the "little golden lady," as her pet name was

WITH CHIDAMBRAM'S BRAHMANS 49

translated, a disdainful, arrogant mite, who snubbed
us soundly, but gave such cool, supercilious glances
of high-caste scorn from such deep, dark, liquid,
mysterious eyes that we forgave her. She wore a
little cotton skirt and jacket, and silver anklets ; and
her hair, divided at the brow in two plaits that
framed the face, held a semicircular rayed ornament
of pearls. This star-eyed beauty did not want to
be looked at nor addressed by us, and had a dread of
being touched by pale strangers with uncovered
faces and no caste-marks, stamps, or guarantees of
position on their broAvs. This imperious mite ruled
her father royally, received the respectful homage
of the sleek old Brahmans, and was petted and
passed from papa to priest and peon as suited her
whims. There was the finest ethnological exhibit
around that treasury table, — the magistrate, his
daughter, and ourselves in front, and the Brahmans
ranged in triple circle of fine, spirited faces above
splendid shoulders, a prosperous-looking, sleek, and
well-groomed board of temple aldermen, directors of
that close corporation of Chidambram, living for
so many generations on the fat of the land and the
offerings of pilgrims, and inheriting the intellectual
monopoly of ages. Each one had been invested in
his youth with the sacred Avhite cord, had served his
time of probation, had married and raised a family,
and now was enjoying his magnificent prime before
disappearing from Chidambram and following the
strict Brahman routine of the end of life. It seemed
amazing that there should be a community where

50 WINTER INDIA

the physical average was so high; and commenting
on the many fine, noble, and dignified countenances
and the statuesque shoulders, Daniel explained it
all: ''Yes, the Brahmans are always splendid of
appearance like these. It is the hereditary lieirness
of their high descent."

CHAPTER IV

FOR THE HONOR AND GLORY OF SHIVA

HE temple jewels are kept in iron-
bound chests in a room fastened by
many locks. The magistrate, the high
priest, and a half-dozen other Brah-
mans of different castes each holds a
key, and all must be present to unlock the room.
Count and record are kept of each article ; many of
the jewels are historic and famous, and all are so
well knoA\Ti to the community that the loss of even
one stone would be as quickly noted on display days
as the disappearance of an idol itself. When the
jewels are thus shown, it is customary for visitors
to leave from ten to twenty rupees for cleansing
them pure from outcast touch. The rupee is a
great leveler, and has purifying effect unaided ;
for nothing could be dingier, greasier, more in need
of alcohol, jeweler's sawdust, and a touch of chamois
than these jewels of Chidambram, unless it were
the jewels at Srirangam or the famously dirty sap-
phires at IMadura.

There was earnest effort and long parley over a
first iron-bound chest that would not open. All the
head Brahmans shouted and struggled with the ob-
durate padlock until the key broke. An agile brother

51

52 WINTER INDIA

whipped out a knife and tried to pick the lock, with
an assurance that bespoke familiarity with such pro-
cesses, but the rusty clamp would not yield. A longer
and a louder clamor, and then a lusty Brahman
seized one of the big keys on the table, a bar of iron
as solid as the key of the Bastille, and began ham-
mering the clasp, laying on blacksmith's blows with
a will. The padlock flew off, the heavy lid creaked
back, and with deafening yells the riches of Chidam-
bram came in view.

They drew out all the jeweled ornaments, the
crowns, caps, hand- and arm-coverings, necklaces,
ear-rings, nose-rings, bracelets, anklets, and staffs
given to the temple's precious idols for centuries
back, laid them on the table, and passed them to us
to handle and defile at will. The Brahmans shouted,
talked, oh'd and ah'd, stretched hands over our
shoulders to call attention to some special beauty or
marvel, and even snatched them from our hands.
Their eyes shone and their faces glowed with pride
and joy in these treasures, their delight at seeing
them childlike in its expression. They all told at
once how the ruby bracelets were given the goddess
by the rani, wife of the Raja of Tanjore, in fulfil-
ment of a vow ; and how, when the pious rani learned
that the goddess had no ear-bosses, she despoiled her
own jewel-boxes of her most magnificent ones. Then
they told of Patcheapper Mudalier, the rich man of
Madras, who had given the goddess pairs of gold
serpents scaled over with great jewels; and, at the
sale of the effects of the late Raja of Tanjore in
1891, had bought and presented the temple with a

FOR THE HONOR AND GLORY OF SHIVA 53

huge Phrygian cap, or war-bonnet, covered with
hundreds of cabochon rubies and table-cut diamonds,
along with a great breastplate over six inches
square, set solidly with large flat rubies— rubies of
the most perfect tint, and set double, ruby on top
of ruby, as was the old Hindu custom, until the
depth and richness of color surpass anything to be
otherwise obtained. Patcheapper had not only given
modern jewels, but he had had the old gems reset,
adding lost stones to historic settings, and putting
the accumulation of loose stones into telling form.

Two enormous water-bottles of solid gold were
lifted out— ''for bringing the sacred water to wash
the goddess," said Daniel. "Six thousand rupees!
Six thousand rupees ! ' ' yelled the Brahmans, anxious
to impress us with the exceeding value of these toilet
articles. A two-foot-long pendant of linked medal-
lions set with rubies and diamonds, worn hanging
from the back of the goddess's crown, was vouched
for as valued at twenty-five thousand rupees, and a
huge crested headpiece glowing with gems was
quoted at thirty thousand rupees ; and then, through
Daniel, the Brahmans were besought kindly to omit
price-marks and quarreling over and outbidding one
another in values, since we had not come to buy nor
to appraise the temple jewels, and had no interest in
their money value.

That shabby table was spread over with more
precious things than one can remember— gold
crowns, crests, tiaras, plumes, bosses for the ears,
ornaments for the hair and the forehead, nose-rings,
necklaces, armlets, bracelets, zones, girdles, anklets,

54 WINTER INDIA

and every possible article of Hindu jewelry worn
for these two thousand years— forms and designs
but little changed in two thousand years; the same
ancient, archaic Swami or Dravidian style of orna-
ments having been worn centuries before Chidam-
bram's building, according to the sculptured records
of the Buddhist monuments. Every piece was
crusted over, inlaid with rubies and diamonds, sap-
phires, emeralds, and pearls; with emeralds as big
as bullets— great drops of green dew ; with sapphires
the size of filberts and walnuts, sunk in pure, dull
yellow gold as soft as wax. There were rubies,
rubies, rubies— rubies everywhere— thick as pebbles
on a beach,— and all of them smoothly rounded
drops, blobs, or uneven lumps of warm and splendid
color that went to the heart. A Western lapidary
or jeweler would scoff at and perhaps scorn these
masses of roughly cut cabochon gems, whose flaws
and feathers and cloudings make them of little com-
mercial but of such great artistic value. Crystalline
perfection was not the first test which the old Hindu
jewelers applied to their gems. With an eye first
to color effects and rich combinations of color, all
the flawed stones, the splinters and scales and pin-
points of color, had their value to them, and with
them they achieved results of such richness, such
gorgeousness and splendor, that our mechanically
perfect, geometrically exact, many-faceted, flashing
gems of Western jewelry seem cold, characterless,
expressionless beside these living gems of the East.
We were fairly dizzy with the glow and glitter and
gorgeousness of the display, the feast of gems and

FOR THE HONOR AND GLORY OF SHIVA 55

flow of jewels, the barbaric splendors literally heaped
upon Oriental magnificence within touch before us.
One hardly knows the ruby, its glorious tones, its
true uses and possibilities, until he has had some
such feast of rubies in an Indian temple, and the
taste there acquired is little satisfied afterward with
the glassy, regular polyhedrons of the West. That
deep, clear, warm red ruby, the concentration of all
heat and gorgeous light, the glowing, burning stone
of the tropics, is India's own, its most typical, trop-
ical gem. It became hard to believe, though, that
rubies were rare and precious when, after all seen
elsewhere, Chidambram's Brahmans laid plates and
sheets of rubies— dozens, hundreds, thousands of
them— before us. One could almost think they came
like buttons on a haberdasher's card, and that one
bought them by the gross or great gross as required,
or by dry measure perhaps— by heaped-up pints
and overflowing quarts.

For nearly two hours we handled the collars and
crowns and ornaments passed out to us, until we
were well surfeited with splendors, until pear-
shaped pearls in rains and fringes could excite no
more surprise, until big tallow-drop emeralds were
the common thing, and star sapphires had to be of
thumb 's-end size to command any praise. Ropes of
necklaces made of overlapping gold pieces clanged in
dead weight on the table; the famous parrot cut
from a single emerald was produced ^^^th cheers,
and broad manacle-bracelets, set with ancient stones
recut in European facetings, closed the list. The
lid of the last chest was slammed down, the Brah-

56 WINTER INDIA

mans voiced their pent-up joy, and we sank back in
our chairs, well exhausted with the strain of long-
continued attention to such dazzling surprises. More
flower garlands were dropped on our shoulders and
enormous bouquets were presented us. Trays of
fruit and cake and sugar things were offered, which
we formally praised, accepted, and touched accord-
ing to custom ; and, by the same sign and custom,
we never saw the defiled stuff again.

The musicians struck up a deafening paean, the
crowd in the courtyard made way, and we were borne
triumphantly on for the great Nautch dance in the
choltry, or Hall of a Thousand Columns. That
noblest Brahman of them all, who had maintained a
particular protectorate over us in the jewel-room
and so summarily checked the other Brahmans when
they extolled the jewels too full-lunged, all but gave
his arm as he escorted us across the court, waving
the others aside or pushing them with force when
necessary. This arch-heathen, Pattu Thacheadar,
the Superb, highest-caste Dikshatar Brahman of the
white cord and the carved bead, was altogether
the finest specimen Chidambram afforded, and
sculptor or painter would equally delight in him as
model. This big Brahman beau-ed us gallantly
across the courts, up into the lofty pillared hall, and
seated us in the waiting arm-chairs with a grace and
address that would have become a leader of cotillions
—barefooted, with only a red-bordered sheet for his
full-dress uniform of social ceremony !

The magistrate, in his scholarly, gold-bowed
spectacles, and the disdainful little goddess, Thun-

l-Alir THAClllCADAK.

FOR THE HONOR AND GLORY OF SHIVA 59

gama, throned upon the peons' shoulders, were with
US; and the august company of Brahmans seated
themselves in a half-circle upon the stone floor,
Pattu, the Superb, towering head and shoulders in
the front row of the highest-caste marks. There was
a May-pole in the middle of the vaulted hall, hung
over with long streamers.

Six barefooted, neat-looking colored girls in
starched muslin dress skirts and velvet jackets of
antiquated cut and no fit whatever, stepped forward
and, in methodical march and countermarch to a
nasal chorus, braided the May-pole's ribbons down
to their hands; in reverse order unbraided them,
and stepped demurely back in line. We were breath-
less with surprise.

Was that the famous sacred temple dance ? Could
six octoroons, matter-of-fact young " yaller gals,"
shuffling slowly around a May-pole, ever give rise to
such visions of beauty and grace as only the name
of the Nautch dance conjures up ? Oh, no ! It was
surely coming next. There would be something
graceful and bewitching, something in gorgeous na-
tive costume, after this purposely tame and tedious
cake-walk by colored church members in velveteen
basques trimmed with cotton lace.

The same wooden young persons marched out
again in line. We cheered ourselves, noting then
that they were almost Oriental from the collar up-
ward—what with necklaces and ear-studs and ear-
rings looped back to the decorated waterfall, the
"bath bun" of hair at the back of their heads, and
nose-rings whose lowest pearl trembled on their

60 WINTER INDIA

lips, the literal pearls of speech. "We questioned
Daniel closely to know if these really were the
picked dancers, the flower of Chidambram 's beauties ;
if he had never seen them dance in voluminous,
diaphanous, graceful native dress?

"No, your ladyship. These are their richest
clothings. You see the magnificent velvets of their
costumes. They never wear the common sari now
that they have tltese. It is always this splendid
dress they wear for the dancing when I bring Euro-
pean visitors."

The dance went on, a tame and tedious cake-walk,
purely callisthenic school-girl exercise to the end,
save in one or two less shuffling measures where they
made undeniable eyes at us, posed one finger against
the cheek, and looked unutterable archness. ' ' Notice
the postures, see the sentiments of the countenance,"
said Daniel, who was a connoisseur in such dances,
and gifted with the second sight needed to make
anything at all fascinating out of the languid
measures. "It is praise of the goddess," said the
old gentleman, rapturously, delighted with the
spectacle. But such a dreary ballet! Such a mo-
notonous walk-around to minor airs thumped and
blown by the earnest temple musicians, and plaintive
choruses wailed by the dancers themselves, would
never fill a theater nor a side-show in the West, and
the Midway Plaisance would have closed for lack
of patronage had its Oriental dances been like this.

The sun struggled through the clouds and sent
shafts and ladders of gold down from the high win-
dows, that, touching the white draperies of the seated

FOR THE HONOR AND GLORY OF SHIVA 61

Brahmans, illuminated them as if with lime-light.
Pattu Thaeheadar was radiant and smiling, nodding
his approval and delight, and enjoying the great
day and his prominent part in it with all of a boy's
vain glee. He hung upon and watched closely the
evolutions of the dancers, and all the Brahmans
buzzed approval when the six advanced and re-
treated, rapping little sticks together in the measure
of some very old dance to Shiva. That was the live-
liest measure trod— very literally trod, with the flat
of the bare foot— by these star-eyed serpents and en-
chanters of the Coromandel coast.

*'It is the most difficult to do this dance, you see.
They are trained to it from little girls. Their limbs
are very movable," said Daniel, aglow with delight.

When the placid program came to an end, Daniel
put on his spectacles, took his place by the May-pole,
and, more like a head schoolmaster giving diplomas
than like the grand almoner of royalty, presented
a rupee to each girl. Each one advanced and re-
ceived it with a bow, and each one then stepped on
to us, stood rigid, and made the regulation military
salute with one hand — a figure only a little more
formal and automatic than the whole gay revel of
the sacred dance had been, something very plainly
learned from a British drill-sergeant's code. The
musicians received their gratuities in the same formal
manner, and the Brahmans, dancers, and orchestra
trooped with us down the hall to the court surround-
ing the temple tank, where the afternoon sun lighted
a scene of splendor and picturesqueness. Despite
the late and yellow light, I snapped the camera to

62 WINTER INDIA

right and left, on gilded gopuras, the mirror tank,
and the staircase of the great hall where the dancers
and Brahmans were grouped unconscious. Little
Thungama and her adoring peon stood for me ; and
then Pattu Thacheadar, special protector and per-
sonal conductor, impresario, and grand manager of
the Brahman troupe, was asked to take the steps, to
pose magnificent, all flower-garlanded as he was. He
assented with excited delight, the other Brahmans
shouted their satisfaction, and with much chaff and
back-talk to his Brahman brethren, this splendid
creature spread out his flower necklaces and stood,
facing the sun, breathing slowly and not winking
for seconds after the button was pressed.

The bullock-bandy carried us and our load of floral
gifts home to the bangla, and after a quick dinner and
long nap carried us on to the station, where Pattu,
the Superb, was parading the platform in waiting.
He had walked the eight miles to take leave of us,
to present more flower garlands and a rare lemon
brought from a grove some miles away on the Coro-
mandel coast. He wore classic sandals, or shoes
bound by rawhide thongs, and the end of his long
white drapery was thrown up over his head and
shoulders like an Arab burnoose. He swung a quaint,
archaic lantern, and in the flashes of light from the
station-rooms he was more paintable and operatic
than at the temple. And this son of the Sun, de-
scendant of ten thousand Brahmans, masher of most
magnificent order, was posing for effect as unmis-
takably as others of his kind pose in Western draw-
ing-rooms—the handsome man and his little arts —
the same transparency the world over.

FOR THE HONOR AND GLORY OF SHIVA 63

The station-master interpreted for him while we
waited a whole midnight hour for the train. Pattu
wanted to know when we would come to Chidam-
bram again ; how far away was America ; how many
days would it take us to get back there ; how much
would it cost ; had we railways there ; or any tem-
ples as splendid as Chidambram.

"Then," said the station-master, "he has been
telling me of the great festival at the temple to-day.
He says there was a crowd there to see the dance,
more than two hundred Brahmans, and he was the
best-looking man there, and you took his picture to
carry to America to show."

Oh ! Pattu ! Pattu Thacheadar !

CHAPTER V

MADRAS AND THE SEVEN PAGODAS

E had expected to have another feast
of jewels at Conjeveram, the Benares
of southern India, but at Chingleput
Junction the constable from that sa-
cred city vfas waiting to tell us that
we could not see the temple jewels, owung to a recent
theft of three thousand rupees' worth of treasure
and the arrest of the head high priest, who held one of
the five keys. ' ' I have just brought forty Brahmans
up with me as witnesses. There has been a big quar-
rel on among the high-caste families, one trying
to run the other out; but as all the temple offices,
even the keepers of the oil, are hereditary, only civil
suits and criminal imprisonment ever oust them.
Each steals a little from the god himself, but does
not want any one else to do so. ' '

AVhen we arrived at the great railway station of
Madras, the largest and oldest city in southern India,
with a population of half a million, there were no
European vehicles to be had— only bullock-carts and
the bandbox jutkas, or native pony-cabs. "There
is a convention of ^riieosophists on now, ' ' said the sta-
tion-master in explanation, but he could not tell what
people with astral bodies wanted with material cabs.

64

MADRAS AND THE SEVEN PAGODAS 65

The jutka was such torture and indignity that we
walked the last block to the hotel in a great garden,
where a hen-brained lot of "don't-know" servants
held the summer-house, which served as hotel office.

There were no manager, no rooms, no memoran-
dum of our telegrams, no anything at this only hotel.
There was no other place to go; no steamer leaving
for five days. The butler led us to a neglected row
of rooms that we might prepare for tiffin and await
the return of the manager. Ants ran riot over the
beds and the torn matting on the dirty cement
floor; the ragged, brown mosquito-netting suggested
horrors in the darkness ; and the bath-water of days
ago stood iridescent in the tubs. We retreated to
the stone porch and then to the dining-room, where
there was painted as a decorative frieze: "Recom-
mend us. Recommend us. The best hotel in India. "
There was a veteran table cloth, but a charming floral
decoration, and we were served a pallid and taste-
less soup, potato croquettes, grilled bones, and "corn-
flower cream," i.e., a watery blanc-mange. Mean-
while, our robust British table neighbors— all resi-
dent Anglo-Indians, with a proper scorn for tourists
—ate broiled birds, dressed the most inviting tomato-
salads, and closed their feast with red bananas and
cheese. " Oh ! that belongs gentlemans. Gentlemans
self buy bazaar," hissed the butler, when we had
sternly pointed to and ordered birds and salad and
bananas.

Then the manager came and bowed us into a car-
riage and off to a branch house, "a residential
hotel," where he said he had most spacious rooms

66 WINTEK INDIA

reserved. Remembering the bath-tubs, the grilled
bones, and the legend on the dining-room walls of
the parent establishment, we had small expectation
of anything sybaritic at the offshoot hostelry. Yet
we were rewarded with a great mansion, in a garden
that was almost a park ; the house was clean and ad-
mirably kept by a black, black butler, twin to the
end-man of the old minstrel shows.

We drove miles and miles through tree-lined streets
to the water-front of the city to find the post, tele-
graph, and steamship offices and the bank. All Ma-
dras and all southern India, planters from Banga-
lur and the Nilgiri Hills, and officials from every-
where, were doing their Christmas shopping those
days, the races were on, and the streets and bazaars
were full of life and animation. We drove into
beautiful grounds and around under a great portico
of a mansion to find the chemist 's shop ; into another
splendid place to find, not the lord chief justice, but
the grocer; and this extravagance of space makes
Madras a city of frightfully magnificent distances.

The burnt-cork butler welcomed us home to our
residential hotel, himself brought the dainty tea-tray
to the marble-floored portico, and stood by with
ear-to-ear smiles, watching us enjoy his crisp toast
and fresh seed-cakes. We began to have a Christmas
feeling of peace and good will to all Madras. The
loggia was so attractive that we ordered dinner to
be served there, rather than dress and dine with any
more self-supplying guests, as at that "best hotel in
India. ' ' The butler assented joyfully, a whole min-
strel troupe ran in with bouquets, fruit pyramids,

MADRAS AND THE SEVEN PAGODAS 60

candle-bells, and a British profusion of electroplated
furnishings. The butler, three assistants, David and
Daniel, a pankha boy, and whispering coolies un-
counted beyond the latticed door, combined to serve
a good dinner to perfection. We wondered how the
residential guests were faring with so much of the
headquarters staff on duty in our apartment, and
the next day learned that we were the only guests
in the new hotel ; that the invisible manager was a
myth, and the black butler the greatest Pooh Bah
off the stage.

Madras residents had, long in advance, engaged all
the "budgery-boats" on the Buckingham Canal for
Christmas week; and instead of one of those com-
fortable house-boats, where civilized existence con-
tinues its regular routine, we had to content our-
selves with a coal-barge— a "spacious and com-
modious fourteen-passenger-boat, " Samuel Daniel
called it— for the visit to the Seven Pagodas, the
ruins of IMahabalipur. Our Turveydrop assured us
that all tourists went in such craft; that Bishop
Phillips Brooks had traveled that way to see this one
of the seven great wonders of the Indian world ; and
as he talked on, we almost forgot the ignominious
cargo-lighter.

The guide-book said to pay seven rupees for such
a boat to go to the Seven Pagodas; the butler said
fifty rupees ; Daniel and David stoutly maintained
fifteen rupees; and we finally gave ten rupees. Coal-
barge No. 1350 was some twenty feet long, with a
mat roof, side awnings, and a single mast ; and when
swept, scrubbed, and drenched under our eyes, we

70 WINTER INDIA

embarked with mattresses, chairs, a few pots and
pans and provisions from the hotel, and a great sup-
ply of our own stores to augment the tiffin-basket.
Instead of driving to Marmalong or Guindy Bridge,
and trusting to meet the dilatory boatmen there, we
embarked at Governor's Basin, and for reward
found the Buckingham Canal drag a stagnant, sew-
ery way past Madras commons and dead walls, past
hedges and kitchen-gardens, for six miles to Guindy
Bridge, where the open country began. We posted
a letter in the mail-box at the bridge, ordering a
carriage to be waiting there at five o 'clock the second
morning, and then were towed and poled at a com-
fortable gait southward through the long, lazy after-
noon, curtained from the western sun, with a fresh
little breeze from the sea pleasantly stirring the air.
It was a fiat, level country, lying close to the
Coromandel coast. Once the canal debouched into
a great lagoon, and the trackers plashed like a file
of storks across a few miles of shallow water, and
often we heard the long boom of the breakers. Vil-
lages nestled under palm and banian groves; vil-
lagers trod the high embankment paths like so many
white storks or red flamingos ; and market, cargo,
and fire-wood boats slipped silently by. We walked
past a series of locks in the late afternoon, and when
the great triangular sail dropped we took our chairs
to the roof and glided down such a sunset stretch as
met one's ideal of the tropics. Two Tamil coolies, tan-
dem, towed us ; a tall boatman poled ; and Daniel 's
brilliant red turban at the fore gave the high key-
note to the sunset color scheme, while his voice rose

MADRAS AND THE SEVEN PAGODAS 71

in sonorous passages descriptive of his country and
his people. Even the untutored blacks of the crew
crept close to hear the foreign language roll from
his tongue in such unctuous streams. He told of the
temple jewels we had not seen ; of the stores of the
finest old Indian jewels which the Nautch girls every-
where own, since the women of the great families
are continually robbed by degenerate sons, who have
learned only more forms of vice and extravagance
with Western education. Then of the Brahmans and
their *' hereditary heirness " he said with a sneer:
' ' Those Brahman priests say they are the gods visible
in the world. Once they may have taught truths,
but now they only humbug the poor people." Bud-
dhism as it flourishes in Ceylon? "More humbug,"
he averred.

The palm-trees grew darker than violet against
the rosy west, until they were black skeletons against
a steely blue, star-spangled firmament, where Jupiter
shone like a small moon and Orion 's three great belt-
jewels streamed golden tracks across the lagoon. We
could hear the boom of the Coromandel surf; dark
palm groves stopped the gentle sea breeze; the sail,
spread to catch any breath, dragged and flapped
against the mast, then filled with the soft sea air
when the star-dotted horizon was visible again, and
drew canal-boat No. 1350 along through the en-
chanted night.

In the middle of the darkness came the clatter of
the falling sail and an angry colloquy by the bank-
side, David and Daniel together venting their strong-
est language at invisible retorters.

72 WINTER INDIA

"It is the twenty-mile lock," said David, shaking
with wrath. "The manager has gone to bed and
will not open the lock again until morning, and we
shall not get to Seven Pagodas before ten o'clock.
They will always do it for the gentries, but they do
not believe when poor native says he has gentries
waiting in a boat." With one lantern and an escort
of innumerable shadows in ghostly clothes, we went
and pounded on the lock-keeper 's door, and besought
him as the most courteous of a whole race of kindly
disposed people to consider a tourist's precious time
and consuming zeal for rock-sculpture, and open his
locks and let us wing and track our way to Mahabali-
pur, "Certingly, certingly. Right away, mem-
sahib," and the lock-keeper came out with his keys,
our crew worked the gates and levers, and while we
walked and talked with our benefactor of the tropic
night, the waters swirled in and lifted the boat to
the next level.

They drove a stake in the soft sand and made fast
at three in the morning, and in the gray-blue dawn
we woke to find ourselves and three budgery-boats
lying at the edge of a great sandy flat, beyond which
a white house and some palm-trees promised govern-
ment cheer. We went over to the dak bangla and
demanded baths, breakfasts, and chair-bearers at
once. The first two demands were complied with;
but at six o'clock it was " wait a little," as it had
been at five-thirty, and, realizing that the sooner we
began the five-mile walk in the sun and sand the
better were our chances of surviving and accomplish-
ing it all before noon, we set forth in the cool of the

MADRAS AND THE SEVEN PAGODAS 73

December morning. Slowly, quite slowly, we strolled
out past great lily-ponds, through sandy commons
and underbrush, for a mile and a half to the sculp-
tured raths of Mahabalipur, the boulder-temples of
the once great city of Bali.

When the pious ones of that place, whether in the
sixth century or still earlier, wished to build a temple
they took a boulder of the desired size, carved it out-
wardly until it looked as if built by masons' hands,
block by block and course by course, and then hol-
lowed the interior into chambers, even one and two
stories of pillared and vaulted chambers. Five such
monolithic raths, or temples, remain in this lonely
strand, with guardian lions, elephants, and bulls
hewn from lesser boulders before them. Two of the
raths are mere sentry-box shrines, or image-cells,
eleven feet square and twenty feet high, carved with
a wealth of exterior and interior ornament. The
largest rath is the Split Temple, forty-two feet in
length, with an impressive interior hall. All the
raths stand empty and deserted, as if touched by
the enchanter's wand, miraculously turned to stone.
There was no moving thing, no sound but the distant
moan of the surf and the rustling clash of palm-
branches. The seven-o'clock sun already burned the
sands and was reflected scorchingly from the rock
masses, whose burned, yellow-brown tones seemed the
very expression of heat.

Very slowly we walked for a mile through a
plantation of young fir-trees, proof that the gov-
ernment of India considers the welfare of this re-
gion, whose long-denuded sands are being reforested

74 WINTER INDIA

for both economic and climatic reasons. We came
out on the hard sand beach where the ocean lapped
in soft, creamy wavelets, and the terrible Coromandel
surges we had heard and read of only splashed
gently on the steps of a quaint little pyramidal tem-
ple carved, course upon course, to its final bell-cap.
Posts and columns stand far out in the water, and a
line of breakers, a mile still further out, mark where
legend says other pagodas stand intact beneath the
waves. Southey has imaged it in "The Curse of
Kehama," but prosaic surveyors say that there is
only a reef of needle-rocks below the surface. That
lonely little temple at the edge of the loud-sounding
sea, although a common thing of masons' construc-
tion, is most impressive of all the seven temples. Its
stone facade is rounded with sand-blast, spray, and
surge, its walls are broken, its portico and platform
half wrecked by the fury of past storms, and its
cool, wet chambers hold Vishnu's images in his dif-
ferent incarnations, — Buddha, Vishnu's ninth ava-
tar, occupying a last cool grotto.

The sun was burning with full strength then, and
we sought the mud and thatch Tamil village un-
der a cluster of palm-trees. The villagers swarmed
out, and an inlcy, sooty flock of cherubs ran beside
us to another boulder-temple, where we sat in the
shade and regarded a huge stone hollowed like a
churn or bowl, where "the gopis made butter for
Krishna in the forest" — "But the cat ran away with
the butter," said Daniel, regretfully. Krishna, the
dancing god of Hindu mythology, very nearly cor-
responds to the Greek Apollo or Hercules, and the
gopis parallel the naiads and muses.

MADRAS AND THE SEVEN PAGODAS 75

The palm-tree was our Christmas-tree that day,
and the villagers, having already stripped it of gifts,
pierced the green coeoanuts and gave us reviving
dMnks. The Tamil cup ids folded palm-leaves into
drinking-cups and drank such portions as their el-
ders gave them. It was a pretty, primitive scene,
purely and ideally Indian, when around the rock
came a British tourist in a pith helmet, a lady
in a helmet, too, with streaming green veil ends.
They looked at the churn, they looked at the temple
on which we sat, but they saw us no more than they
would see canal-boat No. 1350 at anchor beside their
splendid budgery-boat. We opened more coeoanuts
and drank to the merry day, to the Superior Person,
to the Pharisee wherever he may find himself.
" Peace on earth— good will to men." Blessed is
the Christmas spirit and the Briton's sense of de-
corum. Alas, that we had no letters of introduction
with us !

Slowly we walked up over a great scarped rock—
and it was like walking across a hot stove — and
descended steps in its front to see the carving known
as Arjuna's Penance— a rock- front, thirty-seven feet
high and ninety feet long, carved all over with life-
sized figures and animals in high relief, a whole
picture-book of earliest mythology. The wicked cat
who stole the gopi's lump of butter was triumph-
antly pointed out, standing on its hind legs in pen-
ance, while mice ran about its feet. " Really," said
Daniel, " he is waiting for the sea to dry that he
may eat all the fish in it." This gigantic bas-relief
sculpture, beside whioli Thorvaldsen's lion at Lu-

76 WINTER INDIA

cerne is a toy, is from an earlier time than the mono-
lithic raths by the sea, and marks the dateless era of
serpent-worship. But the sunny rock-front radiated
heat like a bonfire, and there was no wish to stand
and study it.

It was then past nine o'clock, the sun was scorch-
ing high overhead, and nothing Daniel could say
about the " numberl esses of gods and goddesses,"
or lesser cave-temples, could stir us. Not "Krishna
and the gopis, his sweethearts in paradise," not
Ganesha, all black, greasy, and garlanded in his own
rock-cut temple, could attract us longer— all interest
in art, archaeology'-, and architecture scorched and
scotched for the day. For a half-mile we had made
Daniel give guarantees of importance before we
would look within a cave or take one extra step in
that terrible scorch and sun-glare of a midwinter
morning.

The sands were blinding and our boats quivered
in heat-waves as we went toward them at noon ; but
while the coolies splashed along over tow-paths sub-
merged by the tide, we were cooled by a gentle head-
wind all the afternoon. The water was a-splash with
bits of silver, and one of the trackers stopped,
wrestled with something under his foot, and threw
a large fish into the boat. At sunset we could see a
faint line of surf beyond the sand wastes, and the
beat of the sea was heard through hours of darkness
succeeding the most beautiful, moist pink sunset.

When the candles were lighted a great, two-inch
brown cockroach ran up the side of the boat, stood up-
side down on the mat ceiling, and waved his feelers.

MADRAS AND THE SEVEN PAGODAS 79

Others followed the beckoning leader until the place
was swarming, and we retreated to the chairs at
the stern, where, with breakneck naps, we spent the
night, shuddering to think of the preceding night,
when, preferring starlight to candles, we had gone
to bed in the dark.

The sky was full of big, yellow, pulsing stars, but
the Southern Cross was not visible. Orion gradu-
ally changed its angle and tilted itself almost in re-
verse; and Orion was a great offense to me in those
low latitudes. As if one went to latitude 0° and to
6° N. and 13° N. to see one's most familiar northern
constellation !

"Mehlady! Meh lady ! The Holy Cross is here
in the sky now," said faithful David at four o'clock,
and he crossed himself as became a good Romanist,
There, straightaway in our wake to southward, were
two lopsided crosses, or diamonds, each outlined by
four great, glowing yellow stars where the narrow
cut of the Buckingham Canal exactly underlay and
reflected the great southern constellation, the filmy
trails of Magellan's clouds floating near.

CHAPTER VI

MADRAS AND CALCUTTA

IHERE is a splendid show of old armor
and weapons in the Madras Museum,
but those trophies of metal-work are
not unique like the relies and frag-
ments from the great Buddhist shrines
of the south. Room after room is filled with bas-
reliefs and images dating from the noblest period
of Greco-Buddhist art, the great tope of Amraoti
having been, like the temple of Boro Boedor in Java,
a picture-Bible of Buddhism. The exquisite marble
bas-reliefs, portraying events in the life of Buddha
and scenes of religious ceremony, and the bands of
ornament give but a starting-point for the imagina-
tion to reconstruct the shrines of twelve and fifteen
centuries ago. There are treasured relics dating cen-
turies before the Christian era, and one bit of bone
in a berjd cylinder, found in the excavations at the
Bhattiprolu mound, is an undoubted fragment of
the body of Gautama Buddha. Our guides were not
eloquent over these Buddhist relics, knowing more
about the jeweled and damascened swords, goads,
spears, and daggers of the late Raja of Tanjore,
whose treasures had lately come to the "wonder-

80

MADRAS AND CALCUTTA 81

house," as the natives term a museum. A wonder-
guide had attached himself to us as we made tlie
rounds, greatly to the annoyance of Samuel Daniel,
whose severest manner could not rout him. At the
door eacli handed us an umbrella, and as we went
down the steps Daniel thrust away the self-appointed
guide and began: "Your ladyships"; but the rival
slipped past, opened the carriage door, and, bowing,
said: "Your highnesses." The constant "lady-
ships ' ' that we everywhere received declared how the
wily Hindu sees and plays upon the weaknesses of
the alien race he knows best, and the "highnesses"
was climax of the play upon snobbery.

One never could have greater need for an astral
body than in Madras, where we drove and drove to
get to any place — through miles of banian tunnels
and green-vaulted avenues, along the Marina road
by the sea, and through the Adyar suburb, where
Theosophists still congregate, despite the cruel ex-
posure of the whole Blavatsky-Mahatma-Yogi frauds
in that very quarter years ago.

Life is lived on narrow margins in India. One
cannot get "something for nothing" in Madras; and
every purchase sent to the hotel came with a foot-
note to the bill: "Coolie not paid." When Samuel
Daniel had left for his home, the next post brought
us a card: "Your ladyships: I forgetfully leave
my carpet and blanket with David's bed at Guindy
Bridge. Please David have send to, as railway par-
cel, to station-master at Trichinopoli." We ordered
the room butler to send a responsible person to the
station and— but before I could finish mv remarks

62 WINTER INDIA

and tell how to prepay the parcel, his grins changed
and he began to storm angrily: "Who pays that
coolie? "Who pays that railway? I am poor man.
Suppose I never see Daniel again? Suppose I die,
and Daniel does n't come? What becomes of my
family then? You pay the coolie. You pay the
coolie. God will bless you. God will bless the good
lady who helps the poor. Think of my family ! Oh,
think of my family ! You pay the coolie ! You pay
the coolie ! God will bless you !" he implored, work-
ing himself into a very frenzy. There was a rush
and rustle of starched clothing and the frenzy sud-
denly ended as David cuffed him out of the room
with word that the memsahib had expected to pay the
coolie anyhow.

The butler presented a bill that was many rupees
too much. "I must see the manager about this," I
said, rising to leave the room. ' ' Oh, your ladyship !
Your ladyship ! Write a chit ! Write only a little
chit— a little chit to the manager, and he will under-
stand and make it right," implored the end-man.
"But I must see him," I said. A torrent of agitated
pleas poured from the minstrel. "The manager is
away. He is at the fort."

"Then I will wait and speak to him when he
returns. ' '

"But, your ladyship, suppose your ship comes!
Oh, your ladyship, write just a little chit," and the
butler wrung his hands in real despair.

That act of the farce having lasted long enough,
I Avrote "too much" on the back of the bill. The
butler carried it out on the silver salver, wont to a

MADRAS AND CALCUTTA 83

table at the end of the hall, and wrote something on
the face of the bill. Pooh Bah had literally gone over
to the other side of the stage and become manager
himself. He returned in less than three minutes
with the corrected bill, with apologies from the man-
ager three miles away at the fort, and with his
autograph ^'Thanks" written at the end. Then the
combination butler-manager-bookkeeper took the
money, went back to the hall table, and receipted
the bill, which was all in the one handwriting.

All the doors of my room, the windows, the hall,
staircase, and portico were full of salaaming ser-
vants when leave-taking came. The neighborhood
must have been emptied for our farewell, as well as
the village of servants in the back yard. From the
triple-part chief to the humblest coolie, gardener,
water-carrier, sweeper, and the despised woman
slavey, all stood expectant, rubbing their noses
upward wnth their palms and extending their hands
as they wailed : ' ' Prissint ! Prissint ! Oh, memsahib,
prissint !"

"Will you kindly telephone to the hotel when the
ship is sighted Sunday morning. There are eight
passengers there," I had said to the clerk on Satur-
day. "Oh, madam," said the pink Englishman in
a shocked tone, "the telephone cannot be used on
Sundays. The telephone office is closed."

At sunrise and at sunset we drove to the empty
harbor, and a black babu at the door of the steam-
ship office said: "The Khedive, she will not come
until morning now. She cannot get in the entrance
of tlu' bri'akwater without daylight."

84 WLNTEE INDIA

"When will the launch go off to the ship?"
"Oh, we don't get the passengers out. You just
put yourself in a massoula-boat when you see the
ship and go out to it yourself."

We engaged a massoula-boat from him with the
agreement that one of the crew should rouse the
hotel when the Khedive was sighted. And he did,
with such fervor and fury that we all drove at a
Gilpin-speed for the harbor lest we miss the ship.
Black boatmen ran the last mile beside us, screeching
their numbers, holding out their tin license-tags, and
dodging the blows of our own courier boatman, who
resented any approaches toward his legal fares. We
and our trunks and traps were but atoms in the
bottom of the cavernous massoula-boat that the black
babu had engaged for us — a primitive native boat
whose timbers, fitted and tied together, only can
withstand the famous INIadras surf. Six black man-
apes plied arrow-headed poles that passed for oars,
and with a wild, resounding chant shot away from
the iron pier. We clung to the high gunwales as
we stood on the loose lattice of poles and mats and
wondered when the first great roller w^ould lift us.
But Ave rowed only a few hundred yards to a ship
within the still pool of the artificial harbor, sheltered
by a breakwater whose opposing arms, bearing twin
lighthouses, were far enough apart for fleets to have
manoeuvered there after dark. Madras people went
past us in dingies and dories and any sort of row-
boats, and we in our arks of massoula-boats were as
ridiculous as tourists generally are in strange lands.
Enough tourists had been duped into engaging these

MADRAS AND CALCUTTA 85

huge surf-boats to make a very imposing appearance
when the fleet approached the gangway in line.
There was a smooth, smiling sunlit sea flickering
beyond the breakwater that serene December day,
and the fabled surf of the Coromandel coast and the
**life-in-your-hand" embarkations at Madras were
other outlived illusions.

There had been a bedlam of coolies at the pier, but
there was ten times more bedlam at the one gangway
of the Khedive; one stream of passengers, servants,
and baggage-coolies ascending the narrow^ swaying
gangway, and another stream trying to descend,
every lung and muscle in the lot working overtime.
We hesitated long, but David, scenting a fray, was
as intractable as a war-horse, and, leaping ahead,
screamed, pushed, kicked, and slapped a way for us
through the struggling bearers, the toppling trunks
and bags. The others did the same, and one would
rather have jumped over than have attempted to
return. As one woman was jerked up by both arms
from the rocking massoula-boat, a lurch sent her
against the gangway chains and knocked her cha-
telaine-bag ofl' and into the water. AVitli it went
watch, purse, keys, tickets, and hotter of credit. And
the ship was to sail in an hour! The purser sent a
boatman in haste, a lighter came alongside, and the
diver was dressed, his headpiece screwed on before
our eyes, and his leaden knapsack arranged as his
weighted feet were lowered from rung to rung of the
ladder until beneath the water. A line of bubbles
showed where he walked about at the bottom of the
sea, and in five minutes he came up with the bag on

86 WINTER INDIA

his wrist, the whole proceeding as orderly and mat-
ter-of-fact as if it were the usual thing to drop and
recover articles in Madras harbor.

The completed railway now gives one choice of a
land route to Calcutta in half the time a ship re-
quires ; but with the dust, heat, and discomfort con-
sidered, it is not always preferred.

"The Khedive, she" made the seven hundred and
eighty miles from Madras to Calcutta in four days
and a half, counting in the whole night that we
anchored among a brilliant constellation of ships'
lights at the Hugli mouth of the Ganges. When the
ship started up the sacred, muddy stream of such
ill omen, with a famous Hugli pilot in an enormous
mushroom solar hat shading him like an umbrella,
ports were closed, ropes laid out, and every officer,
lascar, and stoker was at his post. The ship sailed
smoothly over the shoals and quicksands of such dire
record and nothing happened.

We hastened to the Great Eastern Hotel, to which
we had written in November, again in December, and
twice telegraphed of our coming from Madras.

"We never reserve rooms unless money is inclosed
with the order," said the haughty brown clerk.
"This hotel is full."

"Have you any mail for us?"

"Oh, yes. Many letters. They have Been coming
for some time. The bank messenger brought many
to-day. You will find them in that desk over there, ' '
pointing to a box where every one rummaged and
chose at will.

We drove in the fast-falling dusk to five hotels

MADRAS AND CALCUTTA 87

and four boarding-houses. Not a room nor a tent'
could be had, and we were deciding whether to lay
ourselves on an orphan asylum's door-step, seek the
consul as really distressed Americans, or go back to
the ship and insist upon their keeping us until morn-
ing, when the peon of one of the hotels screamed
and ran after us as we drove past. We hurried in
and sat on the upper backstairs until we could make
an instantaneous exchange of luggage with an officer
called back to his hill station. The small back room
had such shabby furnishings as would cause an
American cook to give notice, and we commanded a
view of tin roofs, chimney-pots, and clothes-lines. A
half-clad, hairy man came in with a bloated goatskin
of water over his shoulder. He pulled the goatskin
neck around and filled the bath-tub from the leather
reservoir— this primitive method surviving in the
"city of palaces" after a century of British rule
and long official example of luxury and splendor.

In the dining-room each guest had his own servant
standing behind his chair. One hundred guests sat
at meat, and more than that many turbaned bearers
stepped silently over the marble floor. Each re-
tainer looked grim determination, and had a row
of knives, forks, and spoons thrust dagger-wise in
his belt. Then we discovered that the table d'hote
was the battle-ground of the bearers, that food and
forks Avere for the forehanded, for the swiftest and
strongest only. Our Tamil was quivering for the
fray and soon in the midst of it, wresting soup and
fish, entree, roast, and game, trophy by trophy, and
emerging from each hand-to-haud struggle with

88 WINTER INDIA

turban awry and eyes flashing. Although this foot-
ball rush was going on in the pantry and dining-
room, the swiftly moving, barefooted contestants
made no sound on the marble floor, and only a sup-
pressed hissing indicated the death-scuffle behind the
screen. Each bearer put down the hard-won plate
before his master, pulled a fresh knife and fork
from his belt, gave them a rub on his voluminous
garments, and fell into statuesque pose again iDehind
the chair.

CHAPTER VII

CALCUTTA IN CHRISTMAS WEEK

[NOTHER winter I took heed and
reached Calcutta betimes, making sure
of hotel accommodations for Christmas
week, the gala season of the Anglo-
Indian year, when all the fifteen hun-
dred civilians who rule India, and all the officers who
can be spared from cantonments, seek the capital.

Going from and returning to Singapore there was
opportunity to stop in Burma, politically a province
of India, but a country quite unique, where the life
and the people are so distinct from those of India
that one cannot class it with Hindustan any more
than Siam. A different religion has made the Bur-
mese a different people, and the absence of caste,
the freedom, the equality, in fact, the acknowledged
superiority of the attractive, capable, Burmese wo-
men have evolved a wholly different social order.
There is light, and laughter and gaiety among its
people, and the Burman is Malay enough to enjoy a
life of leisure. The Chinese come and do the trad-
ing, and the Madrasi come to do the work, and the
Burmese woman keeps the shop, rules the family,

so

90 WINTER INDIA

smokes her ''whacldng white cheroot" with grace,
and exerts rare charm.

In all sight-seeing nothing is such surprise, so Ori-
ental, so dazzling and fascinating as the great Shoe-
dagong pagoda at Rangoon. It repays one for all
the entomological revels of the " B. I." boats to see
that colossal, gilded, and jeweled monument sur-
rounded by picturesque worshipers; to watch "the
elephants a-pilin' teak"; to see the colossal Sleeping
Buddha at Pegu; and to travel past one hundred
miles of sacked rice awaiting the overtaxed railway
transportation, as one rumbles by rail to Manda-
lay, where the fantastic gilt and mirror-covered
temples, monasteries, and palaces equal one's
dreams of "the gorgeous East." Only seeing can
convince one w^hat Buddhism can do for a people
in contrast with Hinduism or Mohammedanism, and
that the pagoda is always in sight in Burma — the
swelling, white bodies tapering to needle spires
often gilded and tipped with jewels — the sites of
deserted cities like Amarapura and Pagan on the
lower Irawadi dotted as thickly with temples and
pagodas as ever they could have been with houses.
Too many chapters would be required for anything
like an adequate exploitation of this picturesque
country and attractive people ; but until the great
European mail-steamers touch at Rangoon the plea-
sure traveler is warned against the slow coasting
steamers on which one lives with the heat and the
smells and the motion at the very stern, and where
huge brown tropical roaches swarm, past any figures
of speech to give idea.

CALCUTTA IN CHRISTMAS WEEK 93

There were brilliant panoramas on Calcutta streets,
those ^'littering noondays and golden afternoons,
but the hotels had only increased in numbers, and
advanced in price in the few years. Hotels in
India are all conducted on the pension or American
plan of a fixed rate per day, with everything save
wine included, and the charges had risen from the
average five and seven rupees to ten and fifteen
rupees, to the indignation of Anglo-Indians, who,
in no gentle terms, blame increasing tourist travel
for the increased cost of living.

I was conducted across a back yard and up a
flight of outer steps to a room whose reed matting
had not been disturbed in many seasons. " But the
Bishop of New York occupied that room last year
and made no complaint, ' ' said the landlady, dramat-
ically.

" Think how much more Christian fortitude and
saving grace a bishop has to have " — and she coun-
termanded the order for a new matting to be laid on
top of the old one in shiftless Indian fashion, and
decreed a cleaning instead. Two inches of dust, that
had to be shoveled off, underlay the matting, then
the cement floor was washed with disinfectants, and
there was one clean room in one Calcutta hotel that
night. When the washstand, grimed with the wear
of many seasons, had received a coat of white paint,
—without a bowl or article being removed,— it was
a splendid apartment— for an Indian hotel. I al-
most hesitated to exchange it for " one of the best
rooms in the house"— a lofty, whitewashed cell
with worn cocoa matting on the floor, where twilight

94 WINTER INDIA

reigned all day and no pernicious ray of sunlight
fell. "This is Room 66 in the Hotel in Cal-
cutta, one of the best in the house," said an Ameri-
can lecturer once, and at sight of the lantern picture
the audience roared with laughter.

" Go and see the Black Hole of Calcutta," said
the Viceroy, who had finally determined and marked
the exact spot. " I have no need to, Your Excel-
lency. I live there now. Room 18, Hotel, ' ' said

another winter visitor.

There is little of stock sight-seeing for the tourist
—only the Zoological and Botanical Gardens and
the Temple of Kali; there are no specialties or local
opportunities in souvenir shopping in Calcutta, and
the European life is not what one comes half-way
around the world to see; so that the traveler's stay
in this city is usually brief. The fact of its being
the capital for so short a season gives Calcutta much
of a watering-place atmosphere.

Except for innumerable turbaned and bare-footed
servants, the pankha, and the use of many Hin-
dustani words, the life is the life of London— a
London with the chill taken off and the sun shining
gloriously. Every one waits for the London
Times to know the real news of the world; and
although the Calcutta newspapers hold diverting
advertisements of cinder-picking and ash-sifting
rights for sale, and "20 Rhinoceroses Wanted,
Rupees 2000 each," local opinion waits on the daily
arrival of the Allahahad Pioneer, a nursery of ge-
nius wherein Sinnett and Kipling and Marion Craw-
ford first won public applause.

CALCUTTA IN CHRISTMAS WEEK 95

Even in December there is suuimer heat at noon,
and one wears the white gowns of the tropics at
that high social hour in Calcutta ; for one writes
his name in the visitors' book at Government House,
all formal calls are made, and letters of introduction
are presented between twelve and two o'clock; and
on Sundays, after church, every drawing-room hums
with visitors' chat. The solid two-o'clock tiffin, fol-
lowing the heavy ten-o'clock breakfast, is so soon suc-
ceeded by the four-o'clock tea and the eight-o'clock
dinner, that it is a surprise that any one survives the
constant feasting which fills Anglo-Indian life. Lit-
tle can be urged against a climate that permits such
Gargantuan feats. The London menu goes with the
British drum-beat round the world, and the beef and
beer and cheese, the boiled potato, the cauliflower,
and orange marmalade are fixed and omnipresent.
More continuous than the imperial drum-beat is the
sound of the soda-water bottle, on which, with the
quinine sulphate, British rule rests. A chill and
piercing dampness succeeds sunset, and often at
night dense fogs shroud lamp-posts and landmarks
until street travel is at a standstill. The modem
Calcutta houses have fireplaces where a few lumps
of coal diffuse a cheerful dryness, but in the older
mansions one is bidden quite seriously to sit nearer
the lamp and enjoy its benign radiation.

The Viceroy comes do^\^l from Simla in November,
and goes on a provincial tour, reaching Calcutta be-
fore Christmas, when tents for extra guests decorate
the lawns of Government House, of the clubs and
great residences ; and the empire revolves within the

96 WINTER INDIA

white viceregal palace. The standard flies above the
main entrance, red lancers of the body-guard pose
statuesque before the portico, and at times a red
carpet rolls down the steps and the Viceroy goes in
state to return princely visits, or to stand on a pearl
and bullion embroidered carpet before his silver
arm-chair and lay a corner-stone, unveil a statue,
or open some new public building. The great event
of the racing week is the Viceroy's Cup, when all
sporting India has its eye on the Maidan, remotest
cantonments as heavily interested as the cheering
crowds on the oval. The Viceroy comes in state, and
his loge and lawn are the center of interest and the
social heaven of the ambitious, who, between events,
parade in the hats and gowns brought out from
London and Paris for the races. Rajas and nabobs
of degree make a brave show too, with their jeweled
turbans, and necklaces worn outside frock coats of
flowered satins ; the tight-fitting trousers to match
as often trimmed with tinsel braid and French
passementerie. Thousands of natives, in the univer-
sal white garments and turbans of every hue, make
such patches of shifting rainbow color in the field,
such a living tulip-bed, as fascinates the eye more
than any scramble of running horses.

Then all the world drives in the Maidan, making
a grand defile down the Red Road and the avenue
of statues, along the Strand and the Esplanade by
the Eden Gardens, where the band plays at sunset.
Eastern and Western fashions are strangely con-
trasted. The bhisti, with swollen goatskins on their
backs, sprinkle the dust, as in the times of Alexander

CALCUTTA IN CHlilSTMAS WEEK 97

the Great and Cyrus, while automobiles fly by, elec-
tric lights prick the blue mists of distance, and night
falls with tropic swiftness.

The Viceroy and his wife together hold a draw-
ing-room a few days after Christmas, when a pro-
cession of women winds slowly up the white stair-
case of Government House lined with red-coated
red-turbaned servants, and past the many barriers
to the throne-room, where the knee is bent to vice-
royalty, and one train and bouquet give way to the
long procession of trains and bouquets. One does
not soon forget the scenes of Lord Curzon's rule
in India. The Viceroy, in his white satin small-
clothes, girt with his orders and stars and the in-
signia of the Garter, and Lady Curzon, that su-
premely beautiful woman of her day, on the dais
beside him in glittering tiara and ropes of pearls,
her long train rippling away over the edge of the
steps, remind one of certain of David's historical
pictures. Lady Curzon has held all native and Anglo-
India under the spell of her charm during her stay.
There could be no rivalry in beauty, and her unfail-
ing tact and sweet gentleness carry all before her.
The Indian people exhausted the imagery of their
several hundred languages to describe her beauty,
the sun, moon, stars, jewels, and all the goddesses
and gopis of their pantheon being drawn into com-
parison to describe the lovely "Lady Sahib."

A still larger company of men are presented to
the Viceroy, receiving alone, at the levee, and then
the state balls and state dinners, small dinners and
dances rapidly succeed one another, while the Vice-

98 WINTEE INDIA

roy's private hospitalities are continuous. At the
end of each week the viceregal family go to their
country house at Barrackpur, fourteen miles up
the Hugli, the large house-party reinforced by a
company of guests brought up on the yacht to
lunch under the great banian-tree. Like Lord
Auckland, Lord Curzon, with the Dowager Empress
of China, rules half the human race and still finds
time to breakfast under that banian-tree. Pos-
sessed of that same tireless energy as those two other
strenuous rulers of his day, President Roosevelt and
the Emperor William, Lord Curzon has given Anglo-
India daily shock and sensation since his arrival,
and sleepy bureaus and slow officials were galvan-
ized to a life that has known no resting since. There
has been no monotony during Lord Curzon 's time,
and those who have waited for him to weary of hus-
tling the East, to sit back in conventional viceregal
fashion and sign the papers brought him, have had
to resign themselves to his omnipresence and ter-
rible activity, his thirst for information, and his
frenzy for work. He has impressed his vigorous per-
sonality upon every branch of the imperial service,
and already has visited more native states and dis-
tant provinces than any predecessor; ordering,
with equal attention to minutiie, the least details
of the increased state and ceremony now attending
the viceregal court, the methods of famine relief
and plague control, and of the organization of the
new district created on the northwest frontier. He
has brought India to the world's attention and given
it an impetus in the path of progress and prosperity.

CALCUTTA IN CHRISTMAS WEEK 99

The " L. G." or Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal,
ruler of sixty millions of people, carries on an elabo-
rate program of hospitalities at Belvidere, his beau-
tiful villa beyond the race-course, and the com-
mander-in-chief and the local military officers at the
fort do their part to crowd the January weeks with
social events for the keenly pleasure-loving English
in exile. It is only at investment ceremonies and at
durbars on the arrival of a new viceroy that the
native princes assemble at the Calcutta court in
great numbers. A few Parsi women in graceful
head draperies of pale silks, and loaded with jewels,
attend the functions at Government House, and a
few elderly and widowed Hindu ladies of rank re-
ceive visitors of their own sex ; but otherwise the
native women of the higher classes remain in as
great seclusion as ever, veiled even when they drive
in closed carriages. On one afternoon of the week,
the India Museum is closed to men visitors, and na-
tive women and children come by the gharry-load
to the ''wonder-house." Foreign women can en-
ter the museum then, mingle with their purdah sis-
ters, and watch the jeweled persons as they stroll
about as curious and as ignorant as the smaller
children.

The India Museum is rich beyond rivalry in
treasures of ancient art. The magnificent carved
gateway and rail from the Buddhist tope at Sanchi,
original of the casts in London and in Paris,
bas-reliefs and images from Gandhara and Amra-
oti, with treasures and relics from the great tem-
ple at Buddlia-Gaya, have long made the fame of the

100 WINTER INDIA

museum. When the Piprawah mound at Padaria on
the Nepal frontier was excavated, and the stone
coffer containing the relics and fragments of the
body of Gautama Buddha were found, no archoB-
ologist or representative of the government was pres-
ent, and the " L. G." of the Northwest Provinces,
when communicated with, divided the treasures be-
tween the India Museum and the King of Siam, the
only Buddhist sovereign of this day. The sandstone
coffer, a soapstone vase, a crystal vase, some bits of
bone and crumbling particles of wood, many pearls,
tiny gold beads and flowers, and cut amethyst, topaz,
carnelian, coral, garnet, beryl, and jade stars, to-
gether with larger beaten gold ornaments in the
shape of the swastika, came to this museum— more
authentic relics of the founder of a great religion
than any European cathedral contains. It pos-
sesses also the inscription recording the deposit of
these relics of the body of the Buddha in that mound
by the members of the Sakya clan— a treasure of
archaeology which makes real the personality of the
Buddha, the founder of that religion no longer a
solar myth. This museum has an average of sixty
thousand visitors a month, equaling nearly the
throngs at the Louvi'e; but the company of bare-
footed, sheeted Bengalis are so aimless and vacant-
looking that one questions whether the carefully
planned exhibits reach beyond the retina, whether
they have any comprehension of the objects.

One does not expect to find a great leisure class
in India, where the struggle for existence is so close
and bitter, but watching the idle drift of natives

CALCUTTA IN CHRISTMAS WEEK 101

past this stretch of Chowringee Road, and the Mai-
dan before the museum, even more than through
the labyrinthine bazaars, one is appalled and op-
pressed with the realization of India's population—
294,360,356. All day the lean, wistful, apathetic
men stream up and down, up and down, going no-
where, doing nothing— hundreds passing at any mo-
ment, thousands in an hour, with no women and
rarely a child in sight. Each Hindu, in his dirty
head-sheet, represents a family crowded back some-
where in the city slums or in mud villages beyond.
One easily believes the census figures, and sees how
the frightful problem of over-population besets the
empire ; how necessary, almost, are plague and fam-
ine, in lieu of wars, to reduce the swarms and herds
of these lank, inert, torpid, half-fed, half-clothed,
half-alive Bengalis, When the sixty million Ben-
galis are crowded seven hundred and even nine
hundred to the square mile of this fertile prov-
ince, and are the most prolific of Indian races, they
must reap three harvests a year even to half live, as
they do. Long-continued peace and the sanitary
blessings of English rule have so preserved and in-
creased human life that disease and starvation seem
too slow agents to accomplish the necessary reduc-
tion. Only tidal waves and earthquakes, annual
disasters like those of Pompeii and Martinique, could
keep the population within bounds.

The Hindus are not a laughing, light-hearted, joy-
ous people, and the Bengali is the most melancholy
of them. He has little, almost no sense of humor,
his voice is always in a sad minor key when not

102 WINTER INDIA

quarreling, and the corners of his mouth are perma-
nently drawn down. A sad sobriety is his sense of
dignity and good form. The hotel porter calls a
"fitton" (phaeton), not with the tyrant voice of
command, but with the sad, piercing wail of a ban-
shee. The sais, wrapped in melancholy and a
quilted bed-spread, responds with a mournful loon
cry, and urges his lean, despondent horses forward,
the running sais in tattered sheet hanging on be-
hind, like an old dust-cloth, with bags of green fod-
der. He jeers but never laughs, and one wonders
if he can, with so little room for a normal pair of
lungs in that thin, flat body and narrow chest. With
no oxygen to speak of for generations, they can
hardly be cheerful or energetic. Athletic sports are
not in the line of the young Bengalis of the Brah-
man castes who crowd the schools, take all the
prizes, and fill the government offices, — Young Ben-
gal being usually a superficially educated poll-par-
rot quite as offensive and hopeless as Young China.
The Bengalis are slow to reward the Christian mis-
sionaries who have worked among them for a cen-
tury, but they are converted to Mohammedanism in
droves, M^hole villages adopting that casteless creed.
The laboring Hindu seems generally incompetent,
and sadly lacks inventiveness, originality, ingenuity,
and the all-embracing but indescribable faculty
known as " gumption." His appliances, tools, and
instruments are unchanged since the day of Alexan-
der, and the mechanical sense seems wholly denied
him. Everything has come to him with his con-
querors. With spindle legs, flat chest, and shrunken

CALCUTTA IN CHRISTMAS WEEK 103

arms, one wonders how one of them can do the heavy
work of dock-yards, harbors, railway yards, and
iron foundries. Everything!: is hoisted on the head
and shoulder, and so little is carried in the hand
that handles are superfluous ornaments on luggage.
One meets grand pianos and packing-cases of equal
size carried on the heads of eight and twelve men,
who step together with locked arms. I watched one
coolie's seven attempts to carry ten pasteboard boxes
from one shop counter to another. Each time he
heaped the load on one arm his draped head-sheet
fell away. Each time he reflung the sheet the boxes
dropped from the limp arm, and the alternating
play went on, until one would have expected an
employer to deal blows— or for any rational creature
to throw away the sheet and get to work. Centuries
have not evolved a way of tying or pinning the
woman's veil fast, and weary housekeepers describe
the ayah's efforts to make a bed and keep her veil
in place as an alternating affair like that of my
coolie and the ten boxes.

The curse of caste and all the difficulties its ob-
servance implies further complicate dealings with
these people, and a century of enlightened rule has
not freed them from its tyranny. The railway has
done something toward leveling castes, but for the
journey only. Instead of reviling and recoiling
from the railway as an invention of the defiling
European for the express purpose of destroying
caste, the Brahman artfullv calls steam one of the
thousand and eight uneatalogued manifestations of
Vishnu. He conceals his sacred thread, washes off

104 WINTER INDIA

his caste-mark, and rides in the jam of a third-class
car, touching sweepers and water-carriers and
corpse-burners, and trusts to after-purification. In-
stead of the Chinese hostility to railways, they have
so much adopted them for their own that there is al-
ready a hereditary railway caste, and railway work-
ers of the third generation are following their fa-
thers' occupation as naturally as if it were an oc-
cupation of centuries' inheritance. One never ar-
rives at an end of the puzzling caste distinctions.
With the four great castes of Brahmans subdivided
into eighteen hundred and eighty-six castes, it is
beyond any European mind to master its intricacies.
Because of caste, no one jostles you in the street,
and insistent touts keep a safe distance.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD

^N traveling north from Calcutta toward
Darjiling, we had the same springless,
cheerless, dusty railway cars as in
[Southern India; the same bare floors,
'hard, leather-covered sofas, and rat-
tling windows of violet glass that gave a wintry,
melancholy look to the flat Bengal plain that we
jolted over all the afternoon. After sunset it grew
really cold in the bare, dimly lighted box, that
finally halted amid clamoring torch-bearers on a sid-
ing by a river bank. It might as well have been the
crumbling mud banks of the upper Missouri as
those of the sacred Ganges that we descended to
reach a flat-bottomed, stern-wheel river steamer of
American model ; but no band of Sioux or Crees on
the war-path ever raised such din as the coolies at
Damookdea when the " up-mail " arrived. The
very stars seemed to reel from the noise, and we
breathed deep sighs of thanksgiving when the boat
wheezed away from the movable station and on
across "sacred Mother Ganges" to Sara Ghat,
where another horde of coolies lay in wait, shriek-
ing and gesticulating in the torchlight as the boat

105

106 WINTER INDIA

advanced. ''I catch coolies," said David, and he
did so, dragging them on board by leg, arm, or turban
end, as chanced. Although we had telegraphed to
have lower sofas reserved, the Anglo-Indian rail-
way brain has not been equal to devising or borrow-
ing a system of numbering and definitely securing
such a reservation. Possession was to the swiftest,
and the foot-race up a soft bank and over ends of
raihvay ties by torchlight warmed one at least.
The air grew colder, and bitterly colder, as we rum-
bled along through the night, and the loose-fitting
doors and windows sent frosty currents across us.
From dreams of Pullman curtains, blankets, soft
mattresses and springs, of double windows and
thick carpets, of sixteen-wheeled trucks with cylin-
drical springs under long cars hung far above the
dusty road-bed, we woke to the cold reality of our
freight- and cattle-car comforts. Before daylight
tea-trays flashed in the lamplight of way stations,
and cups of freshly made tea thawed one and
cheered the gray hour of dawn, while the thick frost
haze of the plain half obscured the sky.

By six o'clock it was light enough to see that the
people had changed overnight with the temperature.
We had left the sleek, supple, barefooted Bengali
in his sheeted drapery, with his thin nose and deep
eyes, and come to a race with high cheek bones and
fiat Mongol faces, first cousins to the Chinese, even
to the cut of their loose-sleeved coats with over-
lapping fronts, and their high cloth boots. The
queue and the turban were worn together ; and that
was not more incongruous than the Hindu caste-

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD 107

mark on the brow of a flat, Mongol face. There
were ruddy-faced mountaineers in Tatar caps on
the platforms, and unveiled women with elaborate
head-dresses and necklaces of silver, coral, and tur-
quoises. Beyond the trees and houses of Haldibari
station there loomed a great rose-pink line of peaks
and snowy battlements, stretching across the upper
sky and resting al)ove ridges of tremendous blue
and hazily purple mountains. As the sun rose, the
peaks paled, turned to gold and silvery white, and
the greatest mountain wall in the world stood
sharply revealed, twenty-eight thousand feet in air,
a parapet of high heaven, the first sight of which
leaves one breathless. Beyond all other mountain
views is that first sight of the Himalayas, as the
great line of snow-peaks towers from the Siliguri-
plain.

After such mundane things as coffee and eggs, the
most absurd little narrow-gage cars, with only can-
vas curtains as protection from the changes of moun-
tain weather, trundled us across a few level miles,
and more slowly began climbing through shady
jungles and along cleared hillsides, with now a view
out to the level, yellow plain where a shining river
stretched to hazy distance, and now a view toward
silvery peaks that rose continually higher. The tiny
engine gained a thousand feet in altitude each hour,
creeping along hillsides planted with monotonous
lines of tea-bushes, through dry and dusty jungles
where trees and tree-ferns, creepers and underbrush,
were parched and frost-nipped, dull with the dust
of the dry season. The toy train crawled over

108 WINTER INDIA

curves and loops, and one wished that the Gladstone
family, owning the line, had provided, instead of the
string of cabs linked together, one well-built and
windowed trolley-car, that one might sit in comfort
and enjoy the views that continually opened. Flat-
faced Lepcha and Bhutia women stared with un-
covered faces and Chinese stolidity as the train
slowly passed them, each woman a family savings-
bank with the hoarded rupees strung in overlapping
rows on her head and neck. Tibetans, too, w^re seen,
and at Kurseong, five thousand feet above the sea,
in the midst of tea-gardens, we were only nineteen
miles from the Tibetan frontier. After tiffin in the
chill, whitewashed dining-room of the Kurseong
hotel, we thawed ourselves in the sunny garden,
where a Catholic priest from the adjoining mission-
house pointed the way to the pass at the edge of
Tibet, where he had been spending some months.
Although the Tibetans come freely across the boun-
dary to trade and to work in the tea plantations, all
English and Europeans are rigorously excluded,
and none of the Indian tea openly reaches Tibet;
the Chinese monopoly of the tea trade being the
chief reason for the severe exclusion laws the lamas
maintain.

Kunchinjinga seemed no nearer, only higher,
still higher, and looming larger against the sky. The
air was decidedly a nipping one, and with all our
rugs and razais and hot-water cans at our feet, we
found the foolish little open tram-car anything but
a rational conveyance for high mountain travel, still
less appropriate when we ran into a dense, woolly

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD 109

white cloud that hid everything for half an hour.
The toy engine screeched, wheezed, panted, and
slowly drew us up to cloudland by many loops and
switchbacks; going backward and forward, but al-
ways upward, until we came to Ghoom, a double row
of huts lining the track. There were picturesque
folk in that bazaar, and foremost was the "witch of
Ghoom," a wrinkled squaw who claimed to be one
hundred years old, and begged for an anna on that
account. A stumpy little Gurkha officer boarded
the train there, his breast covered with war medals,
and his wife covered with rows and rows of gold and
silver coin necklaces and strings of coral, turquoise,
and amber beads; her head as thickly plated with
family assets, and her costume only richer in mate-
rial than the bright purple, red, green, orange, and
yellow garments of the hill folk that made Ghoom 's
one street a lane of color and light. Children rode
pickaback instead of astride the Hindu hip ; all
loads w^ere carried on the back by a strap over the
brow, and after the inert and melancholy Hindus,
these hill folk seemed a light-hearted, laughing
people.

We were eight hours in accomplishing the fifty
miles, reaching an elevation of 7470 feet at Ghoom,
and descending to 6000 feet at Darjiling, a whole
daylight of child's play with a toy train to any one
who has traveled on Colorado's narrow-gage moun-
tain railways.

We were carried from the station to the hotel in
dandy-wallahs, carrying-chairs like the swan and
shell chariots of stage j^antomimes, the bearers

110 WINTER INDIA

turning them backward to climb steps or steep
places. From the hotel windows and the terraced
roads of the town, which occupies the crest of a
knife-edged ridge, one has a full view of the front of
Kunchinjinga and the long running line of snows
across the deep chasm of the Ran jit. All too soon
sunset reversed the pageant of the morning, and as
the white peaks changed to gold, flame color, and
rose-pink, blue and purple mists filled each ravine
and valley. The rosy phantom lingered long before
fading to cold gray and silver, the western sky glow-
ing for a full hour, and a young white moon showing
through the leafless trees.

The bazaar or market-place was empty then, for its
gala time is on Sunday morning, when the tea-pick-
ers come from remotest plantations to show and buy
their finery ; but there was a curio-shop whose owner
was chief est curio of the lot— one of the many who
announce that they will surely reach Lhasa. He
was then studying Tibetan, and produced an alleged
lama who was disloyally teaching him the language
and the religious exercises and formula that would
help him to enter Lhasa in disguise. The lama
fitted well into the room full of prayer-wheels, skull
drums, skull bowls, tobacco-pouches, relic-boxes,
bells, and images, and his presence surely helped
business. With serious face the would-be explorer
told how he should be welcomed to Lhasa as an
envoy of the Theosophical Societies of Paris and
London; how he should gather religious objects for
Prince Ferdinand d'Este, and butterflies for Baron
Rothschild, the latter guaranteeing all the expenses

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD 111

of the trip for the sake of the resulting collections.
He had butterflies by the hundreds, great jewel-
winged creatures of every color, with iridescent
shadings and velvet bloom that were a delight to
the eye. Tibet may still be worth penetrating for
unknown butterflies, but from the early visits of
French priests and English travelers down to the re-
cent visit of Pundit Chandra Das, of native members
of the Geological Survey of India, and of the Japan-
ese Buddhist priests, about all that the world in gen-
eral wants to know about Lhasa is known. Photo-
graphs of its streets and monasteries prove the cor-
rectness of the old engravings; Dr. Waddell has
translated and edited the very complete local guide
for Lhasa ; and three women have gone as near to
Lhasa as any explorer since Abbe Hue. All the
blue-eyed travelers naturally failed to disguise them-
selves, and the Japanese had least difficulty in the
enterprise.

Long before daylight the next morning we started
in chairs in frosty darkness, a sky full of glittering
stars lighting dimly the gigantic white shadows so
strangely high in the sky. We passed through the
military station and sanatorium of Jelapahar, along
the side of the knife-ridge to Ghoom, and up to the
isolated summit of Tiger Hill, fifteen hundred feet
higher than Darjiling, where nothing interrupts the
view of the whole range of snow-peaks from Kun-
chinjinga to Mount Everest. We sat in the lee of a
boulder, wrapped in rugs and razais, our veins freez-
ing in that thin, icy, mountain-top air, while the
mixed lot of coolies and horse-boys accompanying

112 WINTER INDIA

the tourist contingent were unconscious of the cold ;
coolie No. 108 improving the time by tying large
turquoises to holes in the lobes of his ears. They all
wore these rough Tibetan turquoise ornaments, and
turned many rupees by their sale while we waited for
the sun, the lobe of the ear being the regulation show-
case for these regular agents of a regular jewel mer-
chant. The smart tourist always suspects the
professional dealer, and much more confidingly
trusts the simple hillman, and pays him a better
price for bits of chalk dyed blue or ground glass
of cerulean hue. The tip of Kunchinjinga, 28,150
feet in air, first turned rose-red and then caught the
sun's rays, that flashed electrically down the long
white line — a spectacle unequaled. Even the tour-
ist's perpetual-motion tongue was silenced as the
color pageant proceeded, and Kunchinjinga, with
half of its height snow-covered, so transcended all
one's imaginings that it did not seem the vision
could be reality. Mount Everest, to our bitter disap-
pointment, sulked in a tent of clouds to westward;
but Kunchinjinga was visible all day long from
our windows, and at sunset ran through its color
changes once more.

It was degrees and degrees colder the next morn-
ing, but the sky was clearer, and the dazzling stars
lighted the white phantom across the Kan jit more
clearly. The frost lay like snow on Tiger Hill ; the
water by the wayside was frozen ; and the wind
blew with glacial edge that benumbed the little com-
pany of sun-worshipers gathered there at dawn.
Again the world was suffused with a rose flush, a

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD 113

flash of sunlight touched Kunchinjinga and ran
along the line of peaks clear to the three white pin-
nacles that rise above the depression of Choi a Pass.
I had not expected Mount Everest to be merely one
small finger-tip of snow one hundred and twenty
miles away. It was hardly worth while to hold up
field-glasses in that arctic wind to look at that tri-
fling nodule on the far horizon. It did not look
like the greatest mountain in the world, "the high-
est measured elevation on earth." Imagination
could not invest it with any superiority — not while
splendid Kunchinjinga was there before us, with
snow streamers and pennants and rosy cloud-ban-
ners floating away from those storehouse peaks of
gold, silver, gems, and grains, as the Tibetans de-
scribe the five summits.

" Why are the globe-trotters so bent on seeing
Mount Everest?" asked a Geological Survey officer.
*'It is not the finest peak, if it is the highest. It
is only megalomania that takes the tourists off to
Tiger Hill to see the highest peak in the world.
Everest is not to be compared for looks with Peak
XIII and Peak D^. Those are the finest arrange-
ments in rock and snow in the Himalayas. And
then. Mount Everest is not in British territory, you
know, and until we annex Nepal, I object to its be-
ing made so much of."

When we had come down from the Himalayan
heights to the commonplace level of the plains again,
and recrossed the Ganges, we had to share the two-
sofa compartment with a severely silent and resent-
ful Anglo-Indian matron, who stared at us heart-

114 WINTER INDIA

lessly, contemptuously, and evidently denied us the
right to occupy any part of her compartment and
hemisphere. For the trip to Calcutta, she had
brought with her into the compartment a tin
steamer-trunk, a canvas hold-all, two dressing-bags,
a Gladstone bag, a tiffin-basket, a basket tea-pot, a
tin bonnet-box, a roll of razais and fur rugs, a shawl-
strap bundle of cloaks and jackets, and one large
bouquet. Her "boxes" were in the luggage- van.

But this lady of luggage was only forerunner to
the memsahib we met when we left Calcutta the
next night. We had sent the bearer ahead with our
luggage two hours before train time. Wlien we
reached the Howrah station, we found that while our
man was called off to pay a charge for extra luggage
the paper of reservation had been unpinned from one
lower berth and fastened to the upper one by an
Anglo-Indian lady, who then unrolled her bedding,
seated herself on it, and became deaf to any remarks
or remonstrance. She had brought with her into the
compartment the usual British impedimenta — tin
steamer-trunk, canvas hold-all, Gladstone bag, laun-
dry-bag, dressing-bag, tiffin-basket, a roll of um-
brellas, a tennis racket, a bag with her pith hat, also
a wicker chair, a collection of garments which hung
from every available hook, and a large round-topped
Saratoga trunk. When we protested to the station-
master about the changing of his reservations, he
could or dared do nothing. Possession was nine
points, and the tenth was a gleam in her eye that
might have warned away a lion-tamer. We pro-
duced our receipts and insisted that the station-mas-

THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD 115

ter should send our large trunks into the compart-
ment, too, and give us back th(? sixteen rupees we
had paid for extra luggage, or else the memsahib's
trunks should go. They went; and she paid six
rupees through the window Avith wrath and threats.
Only the thinnest veneer of civilization prevented
her from laying violent hands upon us then, or
strangling us in the night. Nothing so shocks and
offends the Anglo-Indian traveler on American
transcontinental trains as the publicity of the Pull-
man cars, where each berth has its curtain and num-
ber, and is as securely reserved as a theater chair.
May they always occupy four-berthed, uncurtained
carriages with infuriated strangers who have stolen
their lower berths and owe them a grudge besides !

CHAPTER IX

MAHABODIII, THE PLACE OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE

|0T Jerusalem nor even Mecca is held
in greater reverence by the millions of
Christians and Mohammedans than is
Buddha-Gaya by many more millions
of Buddhists, who, inhabiting every
part of Asia save India, look upon the temple at
Mahabodhi as their greatest shrine, to the Sacred
Bo-tree beside it as their most holy relic and living
symbol, the most venerated, if not strictly the most
venerable, tree on earth — Bodhi-druma, the Tree
of Knowledge, beneath which Gautama became the
Buddha, the Awakened, the Enlightened.

The so-called Buddhist Holy Land, the ancient
Magadha, lies east of Benares and south of the
Ganges River, within a radius of one hundred and
fifty miles from Buddha-Gaya. The birthplace of
the Nepalese prince Siddhartha, and the original
burial-place of Gautama Buddha, so recently iden-
tified and excavated, are two hundred miles north of
Buddha-Gaya, near the Nepal frontier. Every place
associated with the life of the Great Teacher was
marked by an inscribed column or a votive stupa
by the emperor Asoka 250 b.c. ; and from the abun-

116

THE PLACE OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE 117

dant Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese accounts, every
place has been exactly determined, the recent finding
of the very bones of the body of Buddha in the in-
scribed casket which his family had deposited be-
neath the great mound at Piprawah adding the last
historic link in the chain, and leaving the life of
Gautama Buddha an open book.

Very evidently no other place in India has such
historical importance, and yet no place is so seldom
visited by the legion of winter tourists, as this
Buddha-Gaya of modern Behar, the Uruwela of an-
cient Magadha, the birthplace of one of the world's
greatest religions. Until Lord Elgin's visit in 1895,
no viceroy had sought this most ancient and historic
spot in the empire. Outward India and the life of
the people liave changed so little that one easily
pictures the scenes occurring twenty-five centuries
ago in the same setting — when the Great Knight,
Siddhartha, the Rajput, having made the Great Re-
nunciation, left family and home and high estate
on the full-moon night of July, and, with his five
disciples, journeyed southward from his capital at
Kapilavastu to Rajagriha, and finally along the
river bank to the jungles of Uruwela, where, for
six years, he practised the most rigorous penance,
self-torture, and mortification. When he had re-
duced himself to living on one grain of rice a day,
he fell as in death ; and then, convinced of the use-
lessness of such a life of extreme bodily penance,
he partook of food. His disciples forsook this
starved ascetic for so basely yielding to the body,
and the monk Gautama wandered to the river

118 WINTER INDIA

bank, where Sujata, a villager's daughter, gave him
a bowl of milk and honey which he consumed in
the shade of a bo-tree. Still sitting there, facing
eastward, he attained full and perfect wisdom, the
supreme knowledge, in four meditations. For seven
times seven days and nights he continued his vigils,
assailed by all temptations and evils, say the legends.
For one space he paced to and fro beyond the Bo-
tree — a path immortalized and literally made the
Jeweled Cloister. For another space he regarded
the tree day and night, without removing his eyes,
the great Nagas, or cobra kings, protecting him with
their outspread hoods from the chilling rain, and the
snails covering his head with their cool, moist bodies
from the scorching sun. He could then have entered
into Nirvana, but upon further meditation he de-
termined to share his treasure of wisdom with his
fellow-men. Resuming his staff and begging-bowl,
he walked on to Benares and there converted his lost
disciples and ultimately the world, Gautama Bud-
dha being first to preach universal equality and the
brotherhood of man ; enjoining pity, love, and char-
ity for all ; protesting against caste distinctions,
against propitiation by sacrifices, penances, and of-
ferings; and teaching that man must attain divine
favor and perfect wisdom by his moral qualities and
pure life alone, and thus reach the peace of Nirvana,
the calm that follows upon self-victory, the extinc-
tion of anger, lust, and ignorance.

At the end of six months he sent his sixty disci-
ples forth to preach the new wisdom, and himself re-
turned to the foot of this Bo-tree at Uruwela, and,

THE PLACE OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE 119

there converting the three fire-worshiping Brahman
hermits who lived in that solitude, he gained Ka-
syapa, bcst-bcloved disciple after his cousin Ananda.
As a mendicant, begging from door to door, he re-
visited Kapilavastu and saw again his aged father
and his widowed wife, Yasodhara, who adopted the
religious life and became the first Buddhist nun.
His son, Rahula, demanding his inheritance, was en-
dowed with some of the wisdom acquired by the
Buddha beneath the Bo-tree and admitted to the
order, and Gautama's half-brother also assumed the
mendicant's robe and bowl. For forty-four years
after the great struggle beneath the Bo-tree, Bud-
dha taught in the Deer Park at Benares, beneath
this sacred Bo-tree at Uruwela, or in the Bamboo
Grove at Rajagriha during the rainy season ; and
for the rest of the year wandered through Magadha,
preaching the religion that has held sway over a
great part of Asia for twenty-five centuries, and
in corrupt form now holds more adherents than
any other faith. Preaching the equality of men, he
yet attracted disciples of high birth and station;
and with no praises or reverence for women, voicing
only the bitterest accusations and charges against
the whole sex, women flocked to his teachings, and
he established unwillingly, after much hesitation,
the crowded orders of female mendicants.

After these forty-four years of active proselytism
and conversion, he announced that he was about to
die. He was then in his eightieth year; and while
begging his way toward Kapilavastu, he ate of some
rice and young pork given him in his begging-bowl,

120 WINTER INDIA

and died that night beneath a bo-tree in a grove
near Kusinagara — 543 b.c, if we accept the older
Pali or Cingalese records of the southern Buddhists,
400 B.C., or 478 B.C., according to the Sanskrit rec-
ords. Then all nature mourned, and the Bo-tree,
for the only time, shed its leaves. His remains were
cremated on the spot where he died, and a great
stupa raised by the Sakya clan over the one-eighth
portion of the ashes and relics allotted them. The
rest of the relics were distributed to seven centers
of his docti'inal teachings, where similar monuments
were raised. Excavations at Buddha-Gaya, Bhatti-
prolu, and Piprawah have yielded relic-caskets
containing these undoubted fragments of the body
of Buddha, accompanied in every instance by stores
of pearls and precious stones, gold-leaf ornaments
in the form of swastikas, seals, and inscribed tablets.
The soapstone, crystal, and beryl vases and cylin-
ders containing these relics are admirable pieces of
workmanship, but the only inscriptions dating from
Gautama's lifetime now visible are those from the
Piprawah mound, housed in the India Museum at
Calcutta.

The doctrines were preserved in oral versions,
which were correctly chanted for months at a time
by the priests participating in the First and Second
Councils, held one hundred and two hundred years
after his death. At the Third Council, called by the
emperor Asoka in 244 B.C., a first record of the
Orthodox Canon was written on palm leaves in
Pali, the language of Magadha. A fourth council
of Buddhists was held by the Scythian king Ka-

THE PLACE OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE 123

nishka in 1, or 40 a.d., and elaborate commentaries
were written in Sanskrit and, it is said, engraved
on copper plates and buried beneath a great stupa—
a prize for archaeologists to search for, and for sen-
sation-seekers to manufacture fraudulently. The
separation between the Northern or Sanskrit school
and the Pali or Southern school of Buddhists was
definite then, and in 634 a.d. Iliouen Thsang, the
Chinese priest, attended the great Sanskrit Council
of Siladitya, when the Cingalese versions, the "Lit-
tle Vehicle" of the Pali teachers, were formally
condemned by the adherents of the Sanskrit "Great
Vehicle." Hiouen Thsang acquired both languages,
and studied both vehicles in monasteries in Kash-
mir and Magadha, translated innumerable works
into Chinese, and by his description of the sur-
roundings, the monuments, the images, treasures,
and relics of the sacred places, made the work of
archogologists and historians comparatively easy —
his descriptions as precise as those of a modern Bae-
deker, his services comparable to those of Pausanias
in classic Greece. A modern council of Buddhists
was held in Ceylon in 1875, looking to the transla-
tion, revision, and publication of the Cingalese and
Pali texts, and a Pali Text Society has forwarded
the effort to present these oldest Buddhist books to
modern readers, Dr. Rhys Davids having done most
to introduce Buddhist literature to English-speaking
people. Dr. Max Mliller and many Continental
scholars have given translations of the Sacred San-
skrit books.

It was a raw January morning, with the yellow

124

WINTER INDIA

dust whirling in clouds, when I reached Gaya sta-
tion on my pilgrimage to the Tree of Knowledge,
and it was a cold, dull, prosaic drive of a mile in
a rattling gharry to Gaya town and the dak bangla,
where the government provides chill cheer for the
few European travelers who ever rest there. One

S1i5^^.

elephant passed by on the station road, — a touch
of the ancient East, the Hindu India, that did not
accord with the background of barbed-wire fences,
telegraph poles, and railway tracks, nor with the
well-metaled highway of British India that the
creature trod upon. A string of dusty brown
camels filed across the neutral, dusty distance, and
turbaned folk sped by in bullock-carts or gay
ekhas, the native cabs, mere curtained canopies hung
with balls and bells, and the ponies caparisoned to
match, with high, peaked collars and blue bead neck-
laces.

THE PLACE OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE 125

Modern Gaya, the Sahibs' market, is an orderly
new town with broad thoroughfares and busy ba-
zaars, the whitewashed houses, the tidy streets and
drains betraying the infallible signs of model Brit-
ish rule, prosperity, and eternal sanitation. It is
distinct from the more ancient Brahm-Gaya, where
huddled houses cut by narrow streets crowd around
the great Brahman temple of the Vishnupad by the
river bank, to which more than one hundred thou-
sand Hindu pilgrims come to bathe and pray each
year— a temple crowded with Buddhist sculptures
and wreck from older temples.

The dak bangla at Gaya stands in a great shady
compound, %vhieh looks upon a busy part of a main
street, a continuous panorama of half-clad and
sheeted figures, of absurd ekkas and l5ullock-carts
going by beyond the bangla lawn, as if drawn
across a stage for one's delight. There is a well
at one side of the compound, to which we watched
all the neighbor folk come to fill their brass lotas
or heavy, red earthen jars— half-veiled women, who
needed help to lift the great weights and poise them
on their heads, their slender, feeble figures bending
under the weight. Others, balancing these great am-
phorae with ease, passed out with the graceful, noble
tread of goddesses, the living figures of a Greek frieze.
On the bangla 's covered portico we were sheltered
from the wind and dust, the sun shone warmly, and
little parrakeets twittered and shrieked, flying about
the lawn. We were so well entertained with this
spectacle and play of Hindu life, that we sat for
an hour— balanced ourselves, rather, for that space

126 WINTER INDIA

— on decrepit chairs which, rocking on uncertain legs,
threatened momently to fall beneath us, if the torn
and sagging rush seats did not sooner engulf us.
" If the dak bangla's chairs were then as they are
now, no wonder Buddha sat for six years under the
Bo-tree," wrote the one American visitor of six
seasons in the visitors' book. In time we ate an
early and hurried tiffin — our daily goat-chop, gar-
nished with green peas that rattled upon the plate
like so much bird-shot, and the usual cold and sod-
den Indian rice poured over with a blackish curry
mixture diversified by pools of clear grease — the
worst-made curry in the world, always served one
at Indian hotels, dak banglas, and railway refresh-
ment-rooms. ' * Chutney ? Chutney ? No ! ' ' came
the regular Indian response of surprise when we
asked for some palliative, some condiment to make
the dish of the country go down protesting throats;
but the khansamah boasted that he would be able
to produce " a vary splendid dinner, with cauli-
flower, mem," in the evening.

The road southward for seven miles to Buddha-
Gaya was broad, smooth, and well made, shaded
with tamarisk- and bo-trees, strung along with lit-
tle hamlets and mud huts, and following the banks
of the Phalgu River. Each group of dwellings had
its common well, and, under some wide-spreading
tree, a plastered-up terrace or altar supported a
tiny shrine, or the greasy image of a Hindu god, —
this the same pagan, heathen India, the life little
changed since the all-perfect Gautama Buddha used
to pass this way in his yellow robes, with his golden

THE PLACE OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE 129

begging-bowl and a glory of six cubits height ex-
tending around his head. Brown fields stretched
on either hand ; brown hills bounded the view ; and
narrow streams loitered here and there among the
stones of the broad, sandy river-bed. A few bare-
footed people moved by in silence, and the brown
monotony, the comforting warmth of the hot midday
sun, and the quivering heat-rays in the air, soon
gave an eerie, unreal look to things, a strange, hazy,
hypnotic effect, a sense of dreamy spell.

"VVe turned from the Gaya road to a massive white
gateway, where sheeted Brahmans and turbaned folk
lay in leisured wait for us, and noble white bullocks
rested beside tilted carts that had brought priestly
visitors to this Sannyasi or Shivaite college of Bud-
dha-Gaya. A much-marked Brahman, with the sa-
cred white thread across his shoulder, led us off by
a sandy path toward the pinnacle of a temple roof
just showing beyond some tree- tops, when suddenly
all Mahabodhi, the Place of Great Intelligence, was
revealed to us. The sunken courtyard of the Sacred
Bo-tree lay at our feet, and a great nine-storied,
pyramidal temple soared one hundred and sixty feet
in air, seemingly perfect in every line, from foun-
dation-stone to the gilded pineapple pinnacle, —
precisely the temple built in the second or in the
sixth century, as may some time be agreed upon,
but certainly the great temple that Hiouen Thsang
saw. There was, at the first glance, nothing ruinous
or hoary or venerable about the apparently well-
preserved monument. The good repair was too dis-
enchantingly obtrusive and conspicuous, and for sen-

130 WINTER INDIA

timent's sake one would almost rather have seen
the temple crumbling and vine-grown in a rubbish-
choked court, as it was in 1860. There was a chill-
ing neatness and a forbidding order, too, about the
crowded monuments, remains of monuments, and
foundations of monuments in that flagged area
thirty feet below us, which told of the archaeologist
Avith his tape-measure, his numbers and labels, the
restorer with his healing plaster and illusive cement.
The view came so suddenly, there was such silence,
with no moving object anywhere in sight, that it
Avas as unreal as if a vast drop-curtain had blocked
the path. The silence, too, was befitting the sacred
place, the actual scene of the great penance and
struggle, the illumining of the Light of Asia, the
birthplace of India's noblest religious system, a
place hallowed by the traditions and associations of
twenty-five centuries of religious life. No other
visitors, not a pilgrim nor a Avorshiper, came to that
court for hours. Our melancholy Moslem servant,
the big, sheeted Brahman, who knew as little as the
Moslem of this treasure-spot, and the languid, lesser
Brahman, more brainless still, A\-ere the only moving
creatures in all that sunny space. The shrieks of
little parakeets, as they flew AAdth flashes of emerald
light in and out of the niches of the temple and the
branches of the Sacred Bo-tree, were the only sounds
in the melloAV, slumbering air, that same perfect
midday atmosphere that belongs to the ideal days
of the East Indian Avinter, as to the sun-ripe days
of the American Indian summer. All the Avorld
droAvsed in that golden calm— it was the ideal Ma-
habodhi.

THE PLACE OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE 131

lu Hiouon Thsang's time buildinf?s and monu-
ments were crowded together, almost touching for
a mile and a half, all round the Sacred Tree. There
remain only what one sees in the single glance at
the sunken area ; save as archaeologists, digging here
and there, have found the remnants of palace and
temple and monastery walls, of cloisters and tanks
and towers. Where we stood had been the great
entrance of the monastery, where three thousand
priests once lived, and treasures incalculable accu-
mulated around an inner arcanum, whose solid gold
statue was covered from foot to crown with jewel
offerings. Instead of the great tower-capped walls
stretching a thousand feet either w'ay, and the
throngs of yellow-robed priests, there is a very mod-
ern little galvanized iron pavilion sheltering a col-
lection of broken images, sculptured and inscribed
stones, salved from the pits and rubbish-heaps
around, wreckage gathered after centuries of aban-
donment and final IMohammedan vandalism. The
most valuable and interesting stones have been sent
to the Calcutta Museum, and some few to London.
The guides, of course, knew next to nothing about
these relics. '' General Cunningham put them
there " — " General Cunningham vary high ess-
teemed them," etc. The Brahman knew nothing of
the history of the temple, the tree, or the place, and
was perhaps the most aggravatingly disappointing
of all his vampire tribe that fasten upon one in the
show-places of India. Our gloomy and monosylla-
bic Mohammedan— may all travelers in India be-
ware of that professional traveling servant. Fog-

132 WINTER INDIA

lou Rahman!— knew far, far less. I had to cross-
question, call for and demand to be shown this and
that ; to poke and pry, push and insist and rack my
memory for the very little it held of Fahien's or
Hiouen Thsang's travels. "He duss-sunt know-ah.
People never ask— just memsahib want to know,"
sighed the melancholy Moslem.

"Where are the caves in the hills where the
Buddha lived? Up there?" I asked, pointing. "Is
there a cave there with carvings all over the walls ? ' '

The Brahman could not have looked blanker if
I had asked for the Eiffel Tower, It took long con-
sultation and visible guesswork by both Brahman
and Foglou Rahman for them to answer: "Maybe
there are some holes in the hills over there— but
—he duss-sunt know, memsahib." One might hope
for better things in the next incarnation of the
twice-born Brahman blockhead, the long-descended
Aryan decadent and degenerate— but for the Mos-
lem there ought to be all that the wrath of the
Prophet has promised to the unworthy. The ex-
asperation of being there, of having eyes, yet almost
seeing not, went far toward quelling any deep emo-
tions and dissipating the spell of the place, the som-
nolent calm, the soothing peace, the atmosphere
almost as of Nirvana which brooded there, as we sat
on the ancient stones and looked down upon the
Place of Great Intelligence, the Veranda of and the
veritable Tree of Knowledge.

CHAPTER X

THE SACRED BO-TREE

HE broad stoue staircase which leads
down to the court from the north
commands the view of the temple and
tree which uncounted thousands have
drunk in with ecstasy, a place which
has resounded for centuries with prayers and chants ;
for Gautama Buddha said in his lifetime: "If any
one look with a pleasant mind at a dagoba, or at the
Court of the Bo-tree, he will undoubtedly be born in
a dewa loka," ^ a pilgrimage to Buddha-Gaya being
therefore a certain advance toward Nirvana. Aside
from the historic and religious associations of this
particular bo- or pipul-tree, the Ficus religiosa has a
character and interest quite its own, the effect of
its symmetrical growth and well-balanced foliage
masses, heightened by the continual agitation of its
brilliant, dark-green leaves. Even on that still after-
noon each individual, heart-shaped leaf, with its long-
drawn, tapering tendril tip, was trembling and spin-
ning on its slender foot-stalk, until the whole tree
mass was in agitation — every one of the myriad

1 Deica loka is one of the six celestial worlds between
earth and heaven.

133

134 WINTER INDIA

glossy, green leaves flashing with a separate light as
these thousands of perpetiially moving mirrors
caught the sun. The restlessness and activity of these
bo-leaves, vibrating and striking together with a tin-
kling noise like the patter of soft raindrops on still
nights, make the pipul the most grateful shade-tree,
and the reflections of its glossy leaves suggest always
the first stir of a rising breeze. This flashing, spar-
kling, flickering play of light all over the tree gives
the pipul its unique and individual character — some-
thing like the dazzling, glittering trees that one sees
in pictures by imperfect vitascope. The pipul trem-
bles to this day in reverence for the one who became
Buddha beneath its branches, and as symbol of the
continual change and motion, the impermanency of
the world. The pipul whispers to Rishaba,the Hindus
say, every word it hears, for wiiich reason it is never
planted in the bazaar where trade must employ the
lie. Brahmans claim that Brahma planted the pipul-
tree, and that Vishnu, who in his ninth avatar became
Buddha, was born beneath a pipul-tree. The Hindu
pilgrims, who come in such thousands every year
to offer unleavened cakes and repeat mantras to
this tree at Buddha-Gaya, before worshiping the
print of Vishnu's footsteps at Brahm-Gaya, believe
that a service beneath its branches will relieve their
ancestors for one hundred generations back.

The Bo-tree was always worshiped, swept around,
sprinkled with milk and perfumes, and hung with
offerings in the Buddha's lifetime, and he taught,
from his seat beneath it, that he was but one of a
series of Buddhas who appear on earth as faith

THE SACRED BO-TREE 135

wanes and the world needs purification; that his
religious system would continue for five thousand
years and then suffer extinction, when all relics,
having lost honor and worshipers, would return to
the foot of this same Bo-tree, and there, assuming
the form of the Buddha 's body, be consumed in their
own refulgence, as in a flame. Then a new Buddha
shall come, Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha of Kind-
ness, who shall redeem the world by love and again
show the way to Nirvana.

To devout Buddhists the Sacred Bo-tree is the
most sacred symbol and object in all the world, the
living representative of Buddha himself, who dis-
tinctly enjoined its worship. When the pilgrims,
bringing flowers and perfumes and offerings to
Sewet, failed to find him, Ananda suggested that
some object be designated for them to worship in
his absence, and Buddha said: *' The objects that
are proper to receive worship are of three kinds.
. . . In the last division is the tree at the foot
of which I became Buddha. Therefore send to ob-
tain a branch of that tree and set it in the court of
this vihara. He who worships it will receive the
same reward as if he worshiped me in person."
When requested to honor this tree by sitting at the
foot of it, Buddha said that when he sat under
the tree at Cay a he became Buddha, and that "it
was not meet he should sit in the same manner near
any other tree."

Buddhists regard the Bo-tree as too sacred to be
touched or robbed of a leaf, and devout Burmese
pilgrims kneel, fix their eyes upon it, and in a trance

136 WINTER INDIA

of prayer wait until a miraculous leaf detaches itself
and flutters down. It seemed sacrilege when the
Brahman snapped off a leaf and offered it to me
with the universal Indian gesture of the begging
palm, and, at a request for more, snatched off a
whole handful of trembling green hearts, as ruth-
lessly and brainlessly as the troop of monkeys in
the bo-tree at Anuradhpura had done a few weeks
before.

Despite the reverently worded mantra with which
his own people address the tree, this Brahman
butcher, responsive to a single rupee, continued to
snatch off and break away twig after twig until I
had a great green bouquet of nearly one hundred
living, quivering leaves of Buddhist prayer. With
no seeming appreciation of the sacrilege, he said :
" Some people are satisfied with just one leaf. They
bow to it, pray to it, and carry it away in a gold
box." Then he set himself down on the Vajrasana,
the Diamond Throne, the Bodhi Manda, or Veranda
of Knowledge, to yawn and scratch his lean arms
as he adjusted his drapery.

Three centuries after the death of the Buddha
the emperor Asoka, grandson of that Asoka who
drove the Greeks from India and who ruled from
Kabul to the sea, began a relentless persecution of
Buddhists. He ordered the Sacred Bo-tree cut
down and burned ; but when two trees sprang unin-
jured from the flames and a priest emerged un-
harmed, the "raging Asoka" was humbled, con-
verted. He built a wall around the tree, and marked
the Great Teacher's seat by a carved stone altar

THE SACRED BU-TREE 137

or table— the Vajrasana, or Diamond Throne, the
reputed center of the universe, the jewel that came
up from the center of the earth to mark where
Buddha sat when he attained perfect wisdom—
Bodhi Manda, the Veranda of Knowledge. Asoka
erected a small brick temple, made pilgrimages to
every spot connected with the life of Buddha, and
marked them by stupas, or inscribed columns. He
summoned the Great Council, when the doctrines
were first put in writing in the square Pali charac-
ters of his day; he sent missionaries to all parts of
the world, even despatching his own son as evangel-
ist to Ceylon, and making his daughter bearer of
the cutting of the Sacred Bo-tree sent to Anuradh-
pura,

Asoka 's wife became jealous of the sacred tree,
and tried vainly to destroy it; persecuting rajas
cut it down and filled the roots with fire ; but it
sprang always to the same stature again. The Chi-
nese pilgrims saw and described it ; the first English
travelers found it green and vigorous, and it was
perpetuated, of course, like its congener at Anuradh-
pura, by the dropping of a seed in the fork or hol-
low of the dying trunk. The archaeologists found in
1861 that the tree was growing forty-five feet above
the original level of the court, traces of sixteen suc-
cessive cement platforms showing where that many
trees had mounted upon the roots of preceding trees.
That venerable pipul, with many dead branches and
stumps, was blown over in 1876, and the stripling
Bo-tree flourishing in its mold was carefully re-
planted at the level of the earliest tree, and the

13S WINTER INDIA

Diamond Throne, a slab of polished sandstone, re-
placed in its afternoon shade. There were unusual
numbers of pilgrims for a few years, and the pious
Burmese covered the stem and branches with so
much gold leaf, poured so much milk, perfumery,
cologne, oil, incense, tins of sardines, European food
and confections around its roots, that it began to
droop and die. General Cunningham put in a new
tree in 1885, and surrounded it by a brick wall inlaid
with old carved stones around the window openings
on each side. A marble table or altar was erected
by a pious Cingalese to receive the Burmese and
Hindu offerings, and that sturdy tree glitters and
grows magnificently.

There was no building of any kind at Mahabodhi
in the Buddha's lifetime, nor can any stone or in-
scription be traced to his day. The First Council
met in the great sculptured cave on the hillside,
and it was not until the Third Council, 244 B.C., that
Asoka erected a temple. Buddhism, having found
its Constantine in the "sorrowless Asoka," remained
the state religion throughout the great empire.

The temple became a treasury of relics and riches.
The window-frames and door-frames of gold and
silver were set with gems, the Diamond Throne was
heaped with all the jewels of the East, and, like the
Jeweled Cloister, was literally what its name in-
dicates. Archaeologists are not all agreed whether
the present temple was built by the Scythian con-
querors in the second century, or by a Brahman in
the sixth century. Between the second and fourth
centuries the priests had left Mahabodhi, and Bud-

THE SACRED BO-TREE 139

dhism was at such an ebb that Brahmans seized the
temple, cast out the golden image, and installed their
emblems in its place. "All was desolate and aban-
doned" when Fahien arrived from China, 400 a.d. ;
but, later, Hiouen Thsang saw and minutely de-
scribed the great temple which stands to-day where
stood "the chief of the eighty- four thousand shrines
erected by Dharma Asoka, ruler of the earth at the
close of the two hundred and eighteenth year of
Buddha's Nirvana, upon the holy spot where our
Lord tasted the milk and honey," as the inscribed
stone declares.

In all the romance of religion, nothing equals the
vicissitudes and alternating fortunes of this sacred
place; for, soon after Hiouen Thsang 's visit, Bud-
dhism degenerated, the Brahmans again took over
the sanctuary, and the monastery became a fort.
In the sixteenth century of Buddhism, about 1000
A.D., there was a revival and a reformation of the
faith ; the temple was restored, and priests gathered
in numbers. Again it fell away, and at the time
of the Mohammedan conquest the Buddhists were
persecuted like other infidels, and the ruins of their
temples and monasteries tell how hundreds of priests
met death by fire and sword in such asylums. In
the fourteenth century the King of Burma sent an
embassy to restore the temple, when a few Buddhist
priests were found in the lonely place.

Floods came and left their sand deposits in the
court, brick and plaster crumbled, the jungle crept
upon the open space, trees flourished in every piece
of masonry, and Mahabodhi was without a history

140 WINTER INDIA

until a Shivaite mendicant wandered there in the
first years of the eighteenth century, as the mendi-
cant Gautama had come in his yellow robe so long
before. He lived a hermit among the ruins, attract-
ing other wanderers until he had a sufficient follow-
ing to build a monastery by the river bank. Little
heed was paid these pious squatters, but as their
numbers increased the chief mahant obtained a
firman from the emperor Shah Alum, confirming
them in their ownership of the ground they had
built upon. The sacred courtyard was the quarry
for these builders, and they chose the most accessible
stones — frequently those that were carved and in-
scribed.

The King of Burma sent missions to rebuild and
restore the temple in 1805 and in 1831, and one
of the Shivaite priests, who later guided Buchanan
Hamilton around the ruins, claimed to have been con-
verted by the Burmese visitors, and from their books
to have been taught the history of each monument
within the sacred court. The Archaeological Survey
made examinations and excavations at Buddha-Gaya
in 1861 and 1863, found the true level of the old
court, and brought to light the Diamond Throne and
the greater part of Asoka's rail.

In 1877 another mission from the King of Burma
obtained the consent of the Bengal government and
of the mahant at Buddha-Gaya to restore the tem-
ple. AVord reached Calcutta of the zeal with which
these Burmese were razing and obliterating old
structures and monuments, and Dr. Mitra was sent
to investigate ; but the wreck and transformation of

THE SACRED BO-TREE 141

the temple court had gone too far for any interfer-
ence to avail. The Burmese had demolished gate-
ways, pavilions, and monuments, leveled ruin-heaps,
swept away terraces and votive stupas, used carved
stones for foundations or minor constructions; or,
casting them recklessly on different rubbish-heaps,
made it impossible to identify what Hiouen Thsang
had so carefully described.

In 1879 General Cunningham, chief of the Ar-
chieological Survey, cleared out the entire temple
court of the sand and rubbish of ages, completely
restored the temple within and without, and rebuilt
the portico over the east entrance door and the four
corner pavilions. A miniature stone temple found
in excavating, and repeated in bas-reliefs and
Buddhist sculptures everywhere from Amraoti to
Gandhara, and at many places in Burma, gave the
model for the restorations. Every measurement now
corresponds precisely to the Chinese priest 's account,
and the temple lacks only the hundreds of gilded
images in the tiers of niches that mount to the gilded
amalika at the summit. The temple stands exactly
over the site of Asoka's temple, and the original
floor and altar are uncovered. A ball of clay in an
altar niche contained a rich treasure — bits of gold
leaf and beaten gold in the form of flowers and
stars, pearls, rough sapphires and rubies, bits of
beryl, jade, agate, and crystal. Even the plaster
of this altar was composed of pounded coral, pearl,
ivory, and precious stones mixed with lime. A
similar treasure was found in a vase beneath the im-
age niched in the outer temple wall; and all these

142 WINTER INDIA

relics are now to be seen in the India Museum at
Calcutta, together with tablets bearing Chinese in-
scriptions and scores of terra-cotta lamps, seals, and
votive tablets molded within the outlines of a bo-
leaf.

Of the Jeweled Cloister— that long pavilion cov-
ering the path where Buddha paced to and fro and
flowers sprang up as he trod, whose carved columns
were hung with garlands of flowers and strings of
jewels and half incased in silver and gold— only
fragments remain to ],nark the position and extent.
Asoka's carved sandstone rail, "the oldest sculp-
tured monument in India," has been carefully re-
placed, as far as possible, and in long stretches
shows us that curious carpenter's arrangement of
mortised posts and rails and carved rosette orna-
ments over each joint and cross-piece. The great
pillars and cross-beams of the toran gateway, precur-
sor of the Chinese pailow and the Japanese torii,
have been raised before the entrance, but too much
of it is missing to tell whether it was as splendid
and monumental as the toran of Sanchi which Asoka
later began erecting. Twenty posts and many ro-
settes of the carved rail had been built into the walls
and courts of the mahants' college, and no amount
of persuasion could induce the heathens to restore
them to the temple court.

All about the Bo-tree, the Diamond Throne, the
Cloister, and the temple doorway, the stones were
daubed with gold-leaf and ocher. The Brahman
guide was just able to tell that these yellow smears
were the offerings of pious Burmese, but to any

THE SACRED BO-TREE 145

further qiiostions concerning the Burmese and their
intermittent gilding the Bralmian returned a dumb
stare. He led us up into the temple, through an
archway in a wall twenty feet thick, to a square
whitewashed cell, and up to a second chilly, white
vault where the light fell through a triangular east
window full upon the image on the carved basalt
altar. It was a tawdry, gilded image, more asleep
than serenely meditating, with a Hindu caste-mark
on its brow— "Buddha's mother!" said the Brah-
man, For further shock and disillusionment, it was
only necessary to note that the image was attired
in a red merino petticoat and a tinsel-bordered cape
—"to keep the image warm," said the Brahman,
winding his grimy sheet more closely around him
in that chill sanctuary. There was a litter of food
and flower, incense and candle offerings on the altar
in true Burmese fashion, scores of Tibetan flags and
streamers in the corners of the room, while old Bud-
dhist bas-reliefs built into the wall were buttered
and garlanded in the Hindu manner — a medley of
religions in the one shrine. It was hard to believe
that this untidy vault, this religious lumber-room,
was the supreme shrine, the ark, the tabernacle, the
lioly of holies. It was harder to realize that the
stone image, the shabby old "Buddha's mother,"
all daubed with gold-leaf, successor to innumerable
images of gold, perfumed paste, basalt, sandstone,
and stucco— this clumsy image, with its stolid, va-
cant face, was intended for the same beautiful, pas-
sionless Teacher who meditates, steeped in the peace
of eternal Nirvana, in the gilded temples of Japan
or beneath Kamakura's pine-trees.

146 WINTER INDIA

The Brahman had little interest in the big Bur-
mese bells by the temple door, in the venerable stat-
ues, or in the sacred sites. Whether this place was
the cloistered flower-tank or the lotus-pond, or only
where Buddha washed his robe or his bowl, he cared
not; but he showed us insistently the cylindrical
monument to the first mahant of the Shivaite mon-
astery, who there performed the great penance, or
rather feat, of "the five fires." To attain great
spiritual reward, this sacred salamander sat be-
tween four fires, with the midsummer sun overhead,
and survived to enjoy the expected sanctity. An-
other monument marked where one of the fraternity
had been devoured by a tiger while at prayer, and
the Brahman could not understand our affected de-
pression when he had assured us and reassured us
that the tigers did not come to the courtyard now—
"not eat the priests any more, surely, truly, mem-
sahib. Be not uneasy."

The Brahman boasted of the number of pilgrims
who came to Buddha-Gaya— "from everywhere!—
from Colombo, Rangoon, Tibet-ty, China, Japan ! —
oh, from everywhere! Now is there a Japanese
over there at the palace," pointing toward the mon-
astery by the river bank. He led us to the mahants '
college, and through a labyrinth of stone courts,
where scores of Shivaite priests lounged and loafed
over their bowls and messes of food, and across a gar-
den full of little Burmese pagodas, to the rest-house
built for resting Burmese by King Mindon Min. The
Brahman routed out a languid creature in loose
garments with yards of a pale pink sarong wobbling

THE SACRED BO-TREE 147

between his knees, a short white jacket fastened
closely at the neck, and a topknot of hair under a
cap. A queer-looking Japanese, surely.

' ' Where are you from ? " we asked.

'* Rangoon!" drawled the ghostly Maung Some-
body, and when we protested to the Brahman that
he had deceived us with a mere every-day, near-by
Burmese, he said: "Oh! Burmese, Japanese, just
the same. Their country is a long way off, but they
all come to Buddha-Gaya."

The shadows were lengthening and palms and pi-
puls were rustling in the afternoon wind, but even
after hours spent in Mahabodhi there was something
wanting, something inharmonious in one's general
impression. The temple was too well preserved, and
proclaimed too loudly the plumb-line and the trow-
el's work. Sentiment and day-dreams could not
play upon those precise angles and sharp edges.
And the Tree of Knowledge ! as trim, compact and
shapely as a California orange-tree, with squawking
parrots flashing in and out of its flickering foliage,
as if it were but a common tree for birds to perch
upon ! There was too much of shock and disillusion-
ment at Mahabodhi ; too much of the garish every
day; a lack of romance and mystery, and of any
real sense of antiquity and of chance for imagi-
nation.

We drove back with our treasure of sacred leaves,
and saw the busy bazaars of Gaya before a salmon
and saffron sunset of blinding glory held us at the
dak bangla's gate, while the blind beggar wailed by
the roadside, the women went to and fro with their

148 WINTER INDIA

water- jars, the parrakeets flew shrieking among the
tamarind-trees before they settled for the night, and
our lank Moslem knelt and bent to the ground in
repeated prayers to the Mecca beyond the sunset.

When we went to the midnight train that was to
take us away, a raja and his suite were just arriving
from Bankipur. There was hurry and excitement,
a rushing to and fro of richly dressed attendants,
and much glitter and splendor and flash of color,
as the torch-bearers led the raja in his jeweled tur-
ban to the loAV dhoolie suspended from a curved
silver yoke, and, lifting it, bore him out into the
night. The voices of his followers died away as the
flicker of the torches was finally lost down the road,
but the last impression of Gay a was of that raja
sitting cross-legged, like a god, in his silver and vel-
vet car, departing by torch-light to some palace,
whence he would issue before sunrise to bathe in the
Phalgu, to worship the Bo-tree and the Vishnupad —
all living traces of the great religion obliterated,
like Gautama's own footprints in that dusty road;
the Light of Asia forever extinguished on the spot
where it first rose upon the world; the great temple
and the Sacred Bo-tree drowsing, neglected, in the
sunshine of an empty, lifeless court; the temple of
a sleeping Buddha, of a dead religion, everything
turned to stone, when there have passed but half of
those five thousand years that the Master declared
his religion would endure, an annihilation greater
and more complete than Nirvana already come to
the faith in its birthplace.

CHAPTER XI

THE GREATEST SIGHT IN THE WORLD

|T Mogul Sarai junction, three Eng-
lishmen stood over as many hillocks of
leather- and tin-covered luggage, direct-
ing its removal to the Benares train.
The servants bore it off and flung it
through doors and windows, covering the floor, heap-
ing the seats, filling all the racks and hooks, until
the owners themselves, looking in, said: "Oh, I
say, now. There is no room left for us. We had
best sit in this next carriage, where we can watch
them." When I spoke of this dilemma of the men
and their luggage to others of their nationality,
they said bewilderedly : ' ' For the life of me, I do
not see why you Americans should laugh at that.
I thought you always traveled with so much luggage.
Those enormous trunks— Saratogas, you call them."
It argued nothing to them, no matter how much we
explained it, that we sent the Saratogas to the bag-
gage-car and never sat with malodorous sole-leather
heaped around us in our richly finished and fur-
nished cars.

We crossed a muddy river by a high bridge with
fortress turrets at either end— the very bridge of
"Voices in the Night"— and were then in the usual

149

150 WINTER INDIA

glaring, sun-baked European suburb, wliere broad
roads and waste spaces, new houses in large grounds,
and dusty lines of banian-trees certainly did not go
to make up the Benares of one's dreams. The hotel
was more like the hotels of Java, the dining-room in
a central building by itself, and long rows of bed-
rooms in adjacent buildings. Peddlers, guides, jug-
glers, and snake-charmers haunted the long, flagged
porches all the afternoon. Cobras were drawn out
from small, round baskets like so many yards of sau-
sage, and made to dance on their tails to plaintive
pipings, and then crowded back into their baskets
with as little ceremony ; and a weary little mongoose
was shaken and cuffed and made to battle with the
hooded horror.

Chaturgam Lai, in a flowered and cotton-wadded
chintz overcoat, a w^orsted comforter around his
neck, large spectacles under a fat turban, the caste-
mark freshly painted on his brow, and an unctuous
smile set for the day, rapped on our door long
before dawn. We looked out to see a long line of
sleeping bearers on the brick-floored portico, each
before his master 's door, every turban-topped bundle
rolled in a stripped dhurrie with a pair of bare
brown legs protruding. The air was keen and frosty,
and I wondered if any estate on earth, any future
reincarnation, could be more replete with bodily
misery and discomfort than the regular life of an
Indian bearer or traveling servant— sleeping on cold
stone porches, snatching bits of food at irregular
hours, traveling all day and all night, and as often
standing for hours in the crowded compartments.

THE GREATEST SIGHT IN THE WORLD 153

The greatest human spectacle in India, the chief
incident and motive of Benares life, and the most
extraordinary manifestation of religious zeal and
superstition in all the world, begins at sunrise by the
Ganges bank and lasts for several hours. We started
in the first gray light of the dawn, drove two miles
across the city, and, descending the ghats, or broad
staircases, to the water's edge, were rowed slowly
up and down the three-mile crescent of river-front,
watching Brahmans and humbler believers bathe
and pray to the rising sun, repeating the oldest Ve-
dic hymns. That picturesque sweep of the city front
—a high cliff with palaces, temples, and gardens
clinging to its terraced embankments and long
flights of steps descending to the water— is spectacle
enough when lighted by the first yellow flash of
sunlight, without the thousands of white-clad wor-
shipers at the Ganges brink and far out in its tur-
bid flood. After three sunrise visits to the river
bank, the spectacle was as amazing and incompre-
hensible as at first, as incredible, as dreamlike, as the
afternoon memory of it. I saw it with equal surprise
each time, the key-note, the soul of India revealed in
Benares as nowhere else,— since all India flocks to
Benares in sickness and health, in trouble and re-
joicing, to pray and to commit crimes, the sacred
city being the meeting-place and hiding-place of all
criminals, the hatching-place of all conspiracies.

We sped through empty cantonment streets, but
in the native city every thoroughfare was crowded.
All were streaming one way, and a hum of voices
filled the air as we reached the ghats and came upon

154 WINTER INDIA

sight of the multitude standing waist-deep in the
sacred stream or crouching on platforms built out
over the water. From twenty-five to fifty thousand
people regularly — on special occasions one hun-
dred thousand bathers and worshipers, Brahmans
and believers of every caste— perform their daily
rites in the Ganges, They are so rapt, ecstatic, bent
on and absorbed in the mechanical formula, the
endless minutiee of their worship, that they are
unconscious of the few curious strangers who may
drift up and down the river-front in the brief tour-
ist season. A Brahman cannot let eye or mind wan-
der for one moment lest, omitting something, or
changing the order of invocation, prayers, and move-
ments, he should have to begin the long ritual afresh.
The daily religious observances should occupy nearly
twelve hours, so that a repetition is something of a
penance.

The lowlands across the river were veiled in haze
as, seated in our comfortable arm-chairs on the boat's
deck, we floated olf into the stream. Just as the
sun's disk rose above the hazy, blue plain, a louder
murmur arose, a general chant, the measured re-
sponses of a great congregation. Each one stand-
ing in the stream lifted up an offering of water,
tossed a handful three times in the air, dipped
the body beneath the surface, repeating the while
the sacred mantras, the ancient Vedic hymns, the
names of the gods, and the sacred syllable "Om."
They sipped handfuls of the holy water, rinsed
their mouths, lifted the water and let it stream
through their fingers or pour back down the arm,

THE GREATEST SIGHT IN THE WORLD 155

facing always to the (>ast, and moving their lips
in prayer. They tilled their water-jars and poured
it over their heads, and they drank it "to purify
themselves," our mentor said, although one group
of purity-seekers stood two feet from the mouth
of a rapidly discharging sewer, every sort of city
filth floating to their hands and water-jars, the
bodies of men and animals and decaying flowers
floating by. They drank the pestilent fluid, they
carried it home for household use, and bottles were
being filled to be sent and carried to the remotest
parts of India. Western education and sanitary
science avail nothing against the Ganges supersti-
tion. The British have provided a pure water sup-
ply for Benares, but the people prefer the sacred
dilution of sewerage and cremation-ground refuse,
thus inviting and encouraging every disease.

Whole platforms of Brahmans went through their
morning ceremonies before us as if on a theater
stage. Some sat with fixed or upraised eyes, some
with eyes closed— all absorbed, as if in hypnotic
trance, slowly whispering and muttering their
prayers, lost in contemplation of their fingers, sym-
bols of difllerent gods, dipping each one in the river
many times and praying to it fervently as the water
trickled off. They dipped wisps of grass in the
river and contemplated them prayerfully, meditat-
ing on the one hundred and eight manifestations
of Shiva, the ten hundred and eight manifestations
of Vishnu. They emptied their jars by rule; they
prayed, touching their arms, breasts, knees in slow
callisthenics as they vowed themselves to one and an-

9

156 WINTER INDIA

other of the pantheon ; they produced boxes of ashes
of sacred cow-dung and painted their foreheads
and smeared their arms and breasts for the day.
Others, standing in the stream, drew in deep breaths,
closed first one nostril, then the other, and then held
both nostrils with the fingers for uncounted seconds.
"They hold the nose so. It is a prayer. It is a
ceremony," said Chaturgam Lai, beaming with
proud omniscience. "Sometimes they pray with the
right nose, sometimes with the left nose. ' '

There were some serious and thorough ablutions
going on also, vigorous scrubbings and tubbings that
were good imitations of the Anglo-Indian form of
godliness. Men waded out to their shoulders, re-
moved their garments, and washed them in the holy
water, assuming dry garments as they dropped the
wet ones at the steps. Others energetically sham-
pooed their heads with river mud, for soap is im-
pure to their notion. Women came down to the
river's edge, scoured their brass jars, rinsed, filled
them, and walked away in never-ending processions
upon the broad steps. Even babus in gold specta-
cles and worsted comforters carried off jars of water
to pour over some chosen image. The high-caste
women had bathed and gone before sunrise, the
wives of rajas and potentates rowed off in cur-
tained boats to bathe and pray far from the com-
mon horde. The women specially congregate at one
ghat, barely uncovering their faces to the rising
sun, and gracefully and ingeniously draping the
fresh sari over the wet one as they reach the steps
again. "These are nearly all widows," said our

THE GREATEST SIGHT IN THE WORLD 157

guide, condescendingly; and certainly no people in
the world have more need to implore divine aid
than these Indian widows, accursed things who, as
they themselves and all others believe, have brought
the calamity of death upon their husbands.

And then there were the fakirs; the real things
of one's Sunday-school books, ragged, unkempt, ash-
smeared objects that seemed hardly human, sitting
rigid in their insane, consequential sanctity. Some
were so utterly absurd and ridiculous with their
fantastic ash powderings, that the young American
boy on our boat vented peal after peal of laughter
that continued to tears as one ash-heap, crouched
like Humpty Dumpty on a sunny wall, mouthed and
gibbered back at him spitefully. There were lean
old fakirs, mere wrinkles of skin laid loosely over
some bones, and strapping young fakirs, whom the
police should move on or put to road-making. One
able-bodied specimen of lazy holiness sat with
clenched hand and uplifted arm, wearing the most
consciously self-righteous air; another posed like a
dirty salt image on a broken stone pedestal at a cor-
ner of the ghat ; and a row of toothless old relics sat
in their dirt and ashes waiting for certain Brahman
princes to come along, as in a stage tableau, and
distribute daily alms of rice— "to acquire merit."
Each whining, mumbling old fakir held out his
hands, his begging-bowl, or a dirty end of rag dra-
pery, the almoner doled out a few spoonfuls of cheap
rice, and the rich man moved on to a chorus of bless-
ings, conspicuously well pleased with himself and
the increased assets of acquired merit — precisely the

158 WINTER INDIA

Pharisee of Judea. There are more than two mil-
lion fakirs in India, all leading lives of leisure and
comparative plent}^; but the prize fakir of them
all on the Ganges bank was surely the well-fed and
plumped out one who had all his bones painted in
white outline on his brown skin, and sat comfort-
ably in the sun, waiting for his breakfast to come to
him — a living skeleton of the impressionist school.
There was finally a dead fakir, propped up against a
wall, covered with flower garlands, and soon to be
richly spiced and committed to the Ganges, since
fire is not needed to purify such holy men.

At sunrise the ghouls of the cremation-ground
or burning-ghat began heaping funeral piles for the
day's work, and others of this lowest caste were
carrying yesterday's ashes to the water's edge,
washing them in sieves and pans like any placer-
miner to recover the gold, silver, and jewels burned
with the bodies. The domri, who conduct crema-
tions, surpass the Occidental undertakers in their ex-
tortionate charges— for firewood, oil, and the flam-
ing brand for starting the blaze. Shrouded and
flower-decked bodies, lashed to litters of poles, were
borne down the steps and laid at the water's edge,
the feet resting in the sacred river while the pyre
was made ready and the relatives paid the domri
and paid for prayers by the "Sons of the Ganges"—
a legion of fat priests shouting under great umbrel-
las—brigand Brahmans of the river bank, no less
mercenary and rapacious than the outcast domri,
A dead woman shrouded in white and roped over
with marigold chains was laid whore the foul waters

THE GREATEST SIGHT IN THE WORLD 161

could lave the feet, a sewer arch discharging but
a yard away, and the evil doniri panning out their
treasure close by. When the pyre was ready, the
body was completely immersed for a moment, car-
ried up and laid on the fagots, and a sobbing, fright-
ened little boy, his tunic wet in Ganges water, laid
sandalwood and spices on his mother's body, ran
five times around the pile as priests and relatives
pushed and pulled him through his part, and,
touching the torch to the oil-drenched fagots, ran
shrieking to a servant's arms. The flames leaped
and crackled, jets of thick smoke curled around,
the fire lapped over the edges of the grave-clothes,
and smoke mercifully concealed the rest. The domri
stood by with long irons arranging the fire, adding
wood and oil, while the family group waited there
until all should be consumed. A prisoner's body
from the jail was laid by the sewer's mouth, and in-
stead of being burned in the later, cheaper hours of
the afternoon, was to be cremated at once at the ex-
pense of a rich Brahman, who waited to commit the
ashes to the river and thereby ''acquire merit."

At the near-by ghat a boy's body had been laid on
the lowest step, and without cover or shroud, clothed
as in life, his relatives wailed and dashed Ganges
water over him. He had probably died within the
hour. He might even have been gasping as they hur-
ried him through the streets to be burned and com-
mitted to the Ganges before noon. The body was
not yet rigid as the relatives poured and sprinkled
water over the graceful young statue, wrapped it in
a Ganges-soaked sheet, fastened it to a litter of

162 WINTER INDIA

boughs, and bore it off to the burning-ghat. The
group of women remained behind, and standing in
a circle facing inward, wailed and tossed their arms.
Some were dry-eyed and watched us while they
wailed and beat their breasts, but the mother was
unmistakable in the group — her cries and gestures
in pathetic contrast to those of the others.

When we had twice gone the length of the ghats,
drifting down to the railroad bridge and rowing
back to the upper ghats, reviewing seven miles
of bathing, praying, misguided people, we landed
where the crowds were thickest, the din loudest.
The well filled with Vishnu's perspiration, and in
which Devi dropped her ear-jewel, and the stone foot-
print of Vishnu make this spot the center of busiest
religious life on the river bank. There priests and
people swarmed thickest, all bellowing the history of
the pool in one's ears; and the sick and the well, the
diseased and the robust, crowded the inclosing steps
of this tank of filth, an abominable ooze of Ganges
slime, decaying flowers, spices, sweetmeats, butter,
and milk. They sipped and drank this liquid death,
and we hastened from the noisy crowd of priests,
pilgrims, fakirs, beggars, Brahmans, jugglers, snake-
charmers, money-changers, and idlers with sacred
cows wearing bead and flower necklaces, pushing
their way when it was not obsequiously cleared for
them.

Processions of people carrying water to their
homes and the temples, and spilling it as they went,
made walking dangerously slippery, and we barely
looked into the court of the Golden Temple, where

THE GREATEST SIGHT IN THE WORLD 163

worshipers crowded to jangle the bells, sprinkle
grease, and garland the images. The courtyard of
the Well of Knowledge, in which Shiva resides, was
so offensive that we had no wish to approach the
curb and see the pit of decaying food, flowers, in-
cense, milk, and butter. We took a peep at the
Temple of the Stick, where sugar dogs are the ac-
ceptable offering, and a greedy Brahman whips re-
pentent sinners and then grants them absolution and
indulgence— whips them with peacock feathers —
even gives the unbeliever a swish of the feathers
for two annas and laughs with him at the deluded
divinity he serves !

It was then ten o'clock, and after four hours in
the headquarters of heathendom we were glad to
return to the quiet, empty spaces of the cantonment,
realizing more than before what an appalling task
confronts the missionaries, and what generations of
such blindly bigoted Ganges worshipers must pass
away before any change can be hoped for. A cen-
tury of British law, order, cleanliness, and sanitary
improvement avails nothing against the superstitions
and practices of twenty-five centuries. Yet in this
same center of bigotry and superstition Gautama
Buddha won the people from their idolatry, their
superstitions and caste creed, and for eight hundred
years his doctrines prevailed. With this precedent,
the ultimate conversion of the Hindus need not be
despaired of. We drove out that afternoon by a
dusty, tamarind-shaded road to Sarnath, the Deer
Park of Benares, where the Buddha preached, de-
fied the Brahmans, and built up his great following.

164 WINTER INDIA

Only a few ruins remain of the great group of build-
ings, the crumbling tope in a deserted common the
only object above ground described by Fahien and
Hiouen Thsang. "Did Sarnath pay?" asked my
table d'hote neighbor that night, and I stammered
for an answer. "Because," she said, "they told
us there was nothing to see, that it would n't pay
us to drive out there just to see some rubbishy old
stones and brick heaps. ' '

CHAPTER XII

BENARES

)iT did not seem possible that the Ganges
I banks could ever show such another sight ;
yet a second and a third morning we
rose by starlight, drove through streets
all blue and lilac with frost haze, to
the ghats where the rising sun again glorified the
whole fantastic, picturesque line; turning adobe,
sandstone and grimy whitewashed buildings into
the richest temples and palaces of dreams, and
lighting the faces of the thousands of believers
standing in the swirling mud stream, as thousands
have stood at sunrise for centuries. Even then,
one can figure it out that many thousands shirk
their religious duties— a cheering sign in a way— for,
if the two thousand temples of Benares with their
five hundred thousand idols are tended by eighty
thousand priests, the sacerdotal company alone would
exceed the crowds we saw on any one morning. The
priests are supposed to be driven all day, to have
time for nothing but sacred observances, the bath-
ing, buttering, garlanding, tiring, fanning, and
tending of the idols, and always to begin the day
with the dip in the Ganges. Many of them surely

165

1G6 WINTER INDIA

omit it on these frosty niorniiigs. While the mum-
mery goes on in the temples, the babus and pundits,
even those who have taken degrees in Western uni-
versities, insist that this worship is not idolatry,
that these images of Vishnu, Shiva, Parvati, Krishna,
Ganesha, and the rest, the stone bulls, the sacred
cows, sacred wells, and sacred monkeys, are but sym-
bols— symbols of the purest and simplest creed, of
the noblest faith, the highest philosophy— a sym-
bolism that the masses of course recognize. One
has all of a Mohammedan's impatience and con-
tempt for the puerilities, the grossness, the unrea-
sonable imbecility of it all.

One remembers the Scala Santa in Rome, the
scenes at Assisi and Lourdes, when he sees fakirs
and fanatics making the rounds of all the shrines
of Benares on their knees, and measuring with their
bodies the fifty miles of sacred road that sweeps in
a semicircle around the suburbs of the holy city of
the Brahman's soul, known to the pious Hindu as
Kasi the Magnificent — a city which rests, not on
the earth, but on the point of Shiva's trident.

The bazaars of Benares, particularly the noisy
brass bazaar, are picturesque in a general way, but
the wares exposed are the coarsest and crudest that
the debased taste and careless hand of the day can
produce. Heavy, ill-shapen, vulgar brass pieces
scratched over with thin and poor designs replace
the deeply cut and finely chased brass-work that
used to distinguish Benares. But the glint and glow
and color of the base metal in its myriad forms make
of the narrow street of brass-beaters' dens a long

BENARES 167

genre picture. The fruit and flower bazaar carries
on the dominant, decorative yellow note, and the
orange of marigolds blends well with the rich reds
of earthenware in the pottery bazaar, where the
lotas and chatties have preserved the same lines from
earliest times recorded in sculptures. The kincobs, or
gold brocades, of Benares are tawdry and tinselly
past belief, commonplace in design and color.

If anything could further disenchant one with
Hindu forms of worship, it is provided at the tem-
ple of Durga, the Monkey Temple. One steps into
a red sandstone and pink stucco court, where priests
wait for gifts and gray apes with red faces sit in
rows on the parapets, cornice, and roof, swarm
up and down columns, drop noiselessly beside one
and stretch long, lean, gray arms over his shoulder
and clutch at his garments. The big apes chatter
and mouth and make faces, and the little ones run
screaming to safety, for when gift cakes are im-
pending, the big apes are violent. The priests seem
little more intelligent than the other sacred servi-
tors, and as more and more apes drop noiselessly to
the crowded pavement the tourist turns and flees.

I had unceasingly demanded the great mahatma,
a certain holy man and miracle-worker who was re-
ported as living in some palace garden of Benares,
and but a little way beyond the Monkey Temple.
We left the carriage, disputed passage with a sacred
cow in a narrow lane, and found the green paradise
of the Annanbag Garden, where dwelt Swamji, the
living god. This aged seer and sage, a Brahman of
so high a caste and sphere that no touch or deed can

168 WINTER INDIA

defile him, to whom no sin is possible, sits in his gar-
den, ' ' air clad, ' ' summer and winter alike, indifferent
to heat and cold, hunger and thirst, feeling neither
joy nor sorrow, a soul uplifted beyond all further
test or trial. He sits there imparting wisdom to
his disciples and followers, as Gautama Buddha
taught once in the Deer Park, presenting the same
old unchanging picture of religious life in the East.
Like the Prince Siddhartha, Swamji left home and
wife upon the birth of a son. His duty to the
world was then done, and all the years since have
been given to study, meditation, and the welfare
of his soul, learning the great yoga mysteries and
passing continually to higher stages. Two disciples
early attached themselves to him, begged for him,
and devoutly served him, accompanying the holy
man on his pilgrimages to sacred places, and finally
to his home, where with tearless indifference he
learned of the death of his son, and addressing
words of wisdom to his parents and wife, passed on.
AVithout money, with only a shred of clothing, and
no care for the morrow, he traveled all India, and,
preserved through heat and snow, flood, storm, cold,
hunger, and sickness, he came finally to Benares
when he felt that he had attained supreme wisdom
and triumphed over the world. A pious raja put
the beautiful Annanbag (Garden of Happiness) at
his disposal, and, dropping the one bit of raiment,
his last earthly possession, Paribrajakacharya Sri
Bhaskarananda Saraswati Swamji lives, air clad,
in the same state of nature as primeval man,
sitting beneath the trees by day discoursing to the

BENARES 171

circle of disciples, sleeping uncovered on the bare
earth at night, and eating only the offerings of fruit
and rice which his devotees bring him. A jeweled
youth with a great caste-mark on his brow was sit-
ting with the holy man when we were announced
by Chaturgam Lai and the favor of an audience
asked; and the worshiping youth threw his own
silky white chudda around the saint as we ad-
vanced down the garden path. The holy man sat
there with knees bent, soles turned upward, and
hand lifted in precisely the attitude of the Bud-
dha in art. Birds twittered and the rustling trees
overhead cast checkered shadows on the lean and
wrinkled old ascetic beneath. He had a kindly face,
a gentle, benevolent manner; he was very gracious,
courteous, and human, and the living god began at
once to talk of the impermanence of the world, of the
delusions and fleeting joys of which we mistakenly
make so much. His richly turbaned native visitors
soon forgot our interruption, listening with rapt
attention, and each one bowed reverently whenever
the saint 's eyes were directly turned in his direction.
At Swamji's request, a disciple led us to a little
marble shrine in the garden to see a portrait statue
of the holy man, for this living god is worshiped
in the flesh and in the image, there and in other
cities.

When we returned to the teacher, he had evi-
dently had more information concerning us from the
omniscient Chaturgam Lai. ''You write books,"
said the living god. "So do I. My books are com-
mentaries on the Vedas and encouragements to the

172 WINTER INDIA

true religious life. I like your spirit. I will give
you my book. And you shall learn Sanskrit and
read it. You will give me your book. I already
know English."

"You are yogi, you are mahatma. You are all-
knowing and can perform miracles. Can you see
to America and tell me what happens there?" I
asked, "you can read my mind."

The smile faded from the venerable face. He
looked pityingly, kindly at me. "No, my daughter.
No one in India can see to America. Put away care.
Do not think sorrow. Do not think money." And
the renowned seer of seers, sage of sages, the living
god, the Brahman above caste laid his hand in bless-
ing like any noble old bishop. We spent a charming
half-hour under the Annanbag trees, eating the
saint's oranges, talking with him and his visitors
as at any garden tea. When we were leaving, the
saint threw over our shoulders the jasmine garlands
his worshipers had laid at his feet, wound the bor-
rowed chudda around him, and, rising, stalked with
the swaying gait of extreme age to the gateway.
He shook hands with us fearlessly and convention-
ally, for he was beyond defilement, and urged us to
come again and talk with him in his garden.

Then Chaturgam Lai's tongue was loosened and
he told us more of the great mahatma and of the mir-
acles he had performed. "Why, once they sent
officials to invite him to come to America. They
wished him to perform miracles at the World's
Fair in Chicago." This was shock and anticlimax,
surely.

BENARES 175

We took a boat at the next ghat, and were towed
up-stream by a rope made fast to the tip of the
mast, iu the crazy Yang-tse and Asiatic fashion, and
then were rowed quickly across to the marble palace
of the Maharaja of Benares. Instead of landing
at the inviting marble steps, we climbed the mud
bank and walked around to an untidy back gate,
the land entrance, seeing there an ill-kept menagerie
and the frowzy soldiers of the body-guard. We
passed through several courts and marble halls to
the state apartments, where splendid rugs, tawdry
European ornaments, and mechanical toys made ex-
treme contrasts, and came out on the marble terraces
and latticed loggias overlooking the river and the
city's long line of palaces and temples. The jeweled
beauties of the zenana should have been lounging
there to complete the picture, but they were shut
up behind latticed windows looking on the inside
court. This Ramnuggur palace would seem to be the
most desirable place to live in, but there is a strong
prejudice against dying there or anywhere on that
opposite bank of the Ganges. Generations ago, the
maharaja tormented a Brahman by asking ninety-
nine times where his soul would go to from the
palace, and the Brahman, at the hundredth query,
assured the great man that his soul would enter a
donkey if he died there. Now when an illness be-
comes at all serious in Ramnuggur precincts, the
victim is hurried to a boat and frantically ferried
across.

As we were leaving the palace a fanfare of trum-
pets and bugles announced the arrival of the maha-

176 WINTER INDIA

raja, and we stopped to watch the passing of the
handsome young Hindu in his white and gold tur-
ban, a becoming red chudda wound around his
shoulders. He stopped in front of us, bowed in-
quiringly, and Chaturgam Lai, in his flowered dress-
ing-gown, introduced us by name, as democratically as
any constituent might stop and introduce one to his
congressman on the court-house steps. After a short
conversation on lines of democratic equality, the
maharaja asked us to return and see more rooms of
the palace and take a cup of tea ; but it was then sun-
set, darkness soon to follow, and we had instead to
hurry around to the mud-bank landing, and drift
back to the ghats by twinkling lamplights, a last
dull glow indicating where the domri were burning
the bodies of the poorest believers.

CHAPTER XIII

LUCKNOW

I^^^^FIERE was a truly Oriental hotel at
Lucknow— a great, long, low, white
palace of a building, with an areaded
front upon which the rooms opened.
There was a noble drawing-room,
strewn with the myriad little tables, dwarf chairs,
and knickknacks of British middle-class esthetic
fashion, but glorified by a great display of mari-
golds. The dinner-table was such another feast of
marigolds that one forgave, or forgot, what came on
the plates. The bedchambers were vast, cavernous,
sunless caves, with their ceilings lost in remote shad-
ows; the beds high, hard catafalques in the center
of each such town hall. We spread rugs, blankets,
and razais on these state couches, and, although the
bundles of bedding had grown until they covered
the top of a gharry, not all of them could soften oi'
level those beds.

A typical, listless, shiftless, incompetent poll-par-
rot of a guide undertook to show us Lucknow. The
most meager idea of the Mutiny, only the set phrases
of local incident, had ever entered his head, along
with a sordid idea of profit. "Two rupees a day,
10 177

178 WINTER INDIA

your ladyship," whined the creature, "and, if you
like me, a little more for bakshish, your ladyship."
And so his woolen comforter and embroidered cap
rode on our carriage-box to the Kaiserbaugh, where
in its walled garden the wicked Queen of Oudh and
the three hundred women of the zenana lived in
jewels and idleness, envied and hated by the ninety
nautch dancers housed in the gate pavilion.

Lucknow's museum is indeed a "wonder-house,"
and, fortunate in having most energetic archseolo-
gists and ethnologists as its curators, its collections
in those lines are most complete. This palace in a
park contains in its first hall life-sized figures and
groups illustrating the many races, tribes, and types
of men in the empire, from the blue-eyed men of the
Northwest to the inkiest Tamil and Andaman Is-
lander. There is a distracting show of textiles and
embroideries, of beasts, birds, metal-work, wood and
ivory carving, and such treasures of sculptured rel-
ics from Buddhist ruins that the India of fifteen
and twenty centuries ago is as well portrayed. The
guide knew nothing about any of these things, and
to our questions answered moodily: "If your lady-
ship wishes me to tell you of the INIutiny, I can. If
you will come down-stairs, I will explain the model
of the Residency." Arrived at the model, the parrot
glibly read off the names printed on each tiny roof,
wall, and gate. "This is the Bailly Gate. This is
the hospital," etc., etc. "Yes, yes," we answered.
"We can read that. You go on and explain the
model, and we will follow you." "But, your lady-
ship," wailed the parrot, "I am explaining it to you

LUCKNOW 179

now. This is the Bailly Gate." "Gate to what?"
we asked pitilessly. "Who was Bailly that they
should name a gate for him?" The poor poll-par-
rot's only answer to such conundrums was a rigma-
role about the size of the Residency. "The muti-
neers," "the rebels," "our forces," "the natives,"
and "the king's forces" rolled from his tongue
without any mental effort. "Eighteen hundred
people were besieged here for six months. Many
died. More than two thousand of them were buried
here." When asked to explain how two thousand
could die if there were only eighteen hundred in
the beginning, he whimpered: "But, your ladyship,
let me tell you a little more about the Mutiny. Those
poor people, hoiv they suffered!"

One has rather too much of the Mutiny in India.
It is decidedly overdone. It may be well to keep the
great incident alive in native memory, along with
the justly terrible reprisals ; but the tourist gets
sated with England's woes and foes of '57, and
recalls other wars and sieges since, and trusts that
the next generation is not to be harrowed with the
sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking, Tientsin and
Peking. Yet that tale of English courage and en-
durance is so familiar to all of us, that none can
fail to be deeply stirred by the sight of the battered
Bailly Gate and the pathetic, roofless Residency—
a vine-wreathed, eloquent monument, England's flag
still flying night and day from the tower that never
surrendered. It is the most eloquent, the most hu-
man and speaking ruin that I know; and in that
beautiful garden not a voice is raised, nor an irrev-

180 WINTER INDIA

erent word heard, every sound unconsciously hushed
by the associations. The climax is reached at the
grave of Henry Lawrence, that great soldier who
"tried to do his duty. May the Lord have mercy
on his soul."

We turned away from the Eesidency door sur-
feited with sorrows. We could stand no more mute
memorials of suffering. "What, memsahib! Will
you not even see that cellar f" implored the guide,
a chastened, tongue-tied soul since being informed
that he would be dismissed with six annas only if
he again addressed us as ladyships. "But the mem-
sahibs all like it. We do it to please," he wailed.
An old soldier, survivor of the scene, is guardian of
the Residency, and he saw that we saw every bullet-
hole and shell-mark, and visited every room down to
the underground chambers intended as luxurious re-
treats in hot weather. The old veteran who had
come in with Outram's relief in September, and
fought through the second siege until Colin Camp-
bell's final relief in November, made very real to us
how a thousand people lived in that one building all
the unusually hot summer of '57, with a plague
of flies that covered the floors and walls and buzzed
sickeningly over the people and their food.

We had then supped full of Mutiny horrors, and
we broke with the program of sight-seeing and drove
for hours,— first to the river bank where the dhobie-
men were swinging, pounding, slapping wet gar-
ments with might and main, and spreading them out
in acres of white mosaic on bank and common. We
heeded not ruined Dilkusha, where Havelock died,

LUCKNOW 181

nor the route of Campbell's advance. ''Will the
memsahib not even see the Secunderabad ? " wailed
the guide when we refused to look into that slaugh-
ter-pen, where sixteen hundred and foi'ty sepoys,
fleeing from the Highlanders, were bayoneted in a
cul-de-sac. Even Lord Roberts has said that that
surging heap of dead and dying, more than shoulder
high against the wall, was an incident of war that
sickened men bent on avenging the atrocities of
Cawnpore.

We saw with interest the great Mohammedan
Imambara, the arches of its court framing pictures
of other domes and minarets, its mihrab pointing
westward to Mecca, and its deep baoli, or well, with
encircling marble galleries where it is always cool
in summer. The clock-tower, the white mosque
filled with mirrors like a Champs-Elysees cafe, and
the old palace of the kings of Oudh hung with por-
traits of those flabby and ill-favored royalties, were
tedious stock sights. We saw with far more interest
the latest American magazines lying on the table
of the United Service Club, which now occupies the
old Umbrella House of the nawab, an important
place during the siege.

Although it was a real city of palaces long before
the Mutiny, and a larger place then than Calcutta or
Bombay, the bazaars of this old native capital were
not so very interesting; and, except in the silver
bazaar, a plague of torpid flies tormented us. The
perfume-shops were countless, and we sniffed gums,
grasses, woods, and attars of all the flowers, until
we could not tell the precious rose attar, that sells at

182 WINTER INDIA

four times its weight in silver, from the rose-water
at twelve cents a quart that one carries for ablu-
tions on railway trains.

Again we caught sight of the square gray tower,
—the tower that Mrs. Steele has introduced so well
in "Voices of the Night,"— and the dreadful de-
pression of Mutiny memories fell upon us. The
dark, vaulted bedchambers of the hotel were too
suggestive of the Residency cellar, and rather than
pass a night in the city of such associations, or stop
the next day to feed on the greater horrors of Cawn-
pore, we took the afternoon train for Agra. Some
tourists came on at Cawnpore, anxious to escape
from the horror of it. They had seen it all, and suf-
fered all the terrible deaths in imagination, from the
ghats where the boat-loads of English were burned,
drowned, or murdered in cold blood by the fiendish
Nana Sahib, to the room where the women and chil-
dren were bayoneted and clubbed against the wall,
and the crowning agony of the memorial angel over
the well of burial — all explained in detail by an
old soldier survivor.

Regarding Agra as the most important tourist
place in India, it is disconcerting to have to reach
it by cross-roads, way-trains, and branch lines, ar-
riving always between midnight and daylight. We
changed at Tundla Junction in a deluge of rain,
and rode in a crowded car, seven in a single com-
partment, without any lamps, for an hour to Agra.

A huge turban from the hotel claimed us, and
when the file of baggage coolies had trailed after us
to the entrance, I said, "Get me a gharry." "Very

LUCKNOW 183

well, madam. Very well. Very well, " said the tur-
ban, flourishing his cane. After five minutes I re-
peated the order to turban tramping madly up and
down the flagstones, cuffing coolies and bawling at
every one and no one. "Very well, very well, mad-
am," said this madman of Agra. Another appeal
only pulled the string for another shower of "very
wells," and nothing happened. I bade the bearer
bring a gharry at once, and after big turban had
beaten the air, beaten the bearer, and the two had
screeched a mad dialogue, two lean horses and a rat-
tletrap night-liner drew up and took us inside, the
luggage on the roof, the turban on the box, and the
bearer on behind. The ill-matched horses made a dash
out from the lamplighted station, across the great
common before Akbar's red sandstone fort, and took
a turn entirely round a tree-box. After a second
and a third turn around the tree, I put my head out

and said severely, " Take us to the Hotel ."

"Very well. Very well, madam," floated down
from the box, and with a jerk and a leap the ponies
made another tour of the tree. We continued to
whirl and circle around that sapling by the light of a
thin, wet moon, wrangling voices and whip-crackings
from overhead drowning any further directions to
drive to the hotel. Our friends, following in the
next gharry, thought the first circlings a runaway;
then, hearing the voices from the box, arrived at
another idea, and cried: "Oh, come on to the hotel.
It 's no use trying to see the Taj now. It is after
one o'clock."

Our answer was lost as the ponies ran around the

184 WINTER INDIA

tree again. In time the bearer was made to under-
stand, and to lead the ponies by the bridle out of
the enchanted square, and they splashed along so-
berly enough through wet and gloomy avenues to the
far-away hotel. This was an incongruous, opera-
bouffe sort of arrival in and introduction to the
city of one's soul and dreams, where more of sen-
timent, beauty, and haunting charm aBide than in
all the peninsula ; but sentiment with difficulty sur-
vives the disenchantment and jarring contacts of
Indian travel. One must see India and spend his
sentiment on it afterward.

CHAPTER XIV

AGRA

[0 the traveler Agra means, stands for,
the Taj alone, the most interesting ob-
ject in India; and, arrived there, one
almost fears to precipitate the supreme
moment, to put it to the test, to take
the first look. There was no inspiration in the gray,
cloudy morning or the tedious drive from the hotel
in the farthest suburb three miles to the walled
garden by the river bank. A sandstone gateway
in a long wall admitted us to the serai, or outer
court, where cabs and bullock-carts stood and touts,
peddlers, and guides squatted waiting for prey,
scenting the first tourist rupee of the day. There
fronted the Great Gateway, a magnificent sandstone
tower in itself worth coming to see, its arch inlaid
with white verses and flowers, and a row of airy
little bell cupolas fringing the roof-line. We went
in through the drafty rotunda of a hall, and
straight before us was the vision of beauty, the Taj
Mahal— the most supremely beautiful building in
all the world— the most perfect creation of that kind
that the mind and hand of man have ever achieved —
one of the great objectives of travel that does not

185

186 WINTER INDIA

disappoint, but far exceeds all anticipations— a re-
ward for all the distance one may travel to reach
it— recompense for all one endures in Indian travel.
Well as one knows it from photographs and engrav-
ings, the reality is as astonishing, as overwhelming,
as if he had never heard of it. Even while he first
looks through the arch to the white dome above the
cypress-trees, it seems too rarely perfect to be real,
too incredibly beautiful to be true. It would not
have surprised me if the light had faded, a curtain
had fallen ; or, still less, if one had found he could
not enter, that no foot could touch the garden-path
or the white terrace, which is mere pedestal for this
marvelous work of art. After watching the en-
trance of some others, we paused for a first stead-
fast look, and then, all excitement and exaltation,
followed the marble path and mounted the half-way
platform that affords the perfect view-point, the
white wonder reflected in the long marble canal at
their feet.

The Taj on its high platform, with the red sand-
stone mosque at the west, the complementary build-
ing or ''Response" on the east, and the whole sky-
space over and beyond the river as background,
presents the most harmonious and perfectly bal-
anced composition and is the most admirably placed
building in India. The eye travels from feature
to feature and detail to detail, and the wonder of
its perfection continually grows. The bands of low-
relief carving, the panels and borders of inlaid work,
afford endless study, and one easily accepts the
guide's set story that forty varieties of carnelian

AGRA 189

are inlaid in one small flower, and that the whole
Koran is inlaid, verse by verse, on the" walls. There
is a whole new set of sensations when one enters the
softly lighted, dim white interior, with the echo re-
peating each word like the response of a chanted
service — a single note from flute or guitar a whole
theme. A trellis of marble tracery, with inlaid bor-
ders, screens the two tombs, low sarcophagi of jew-
eled marble resting on inlaid platforms. Mumtaz-i-
Mahal in the center, where the Great Mogul laid
her, and with Shah Jahan at her side are laid away
in real simple white tombs in a vault immediately
below the sarcophagi ; and to them the aged guardian
conducts one with a lantern.

We went back at sunset, and saw only an unin-
teresting yellow ball sink against a hazy horizon,
and the clear-cut shadows in the arches of the Taj
fade to white and gray. In a little while the yel-
low ball of the full moon rose beyond the river, and
flooded the eastern arch with a splendor unimag-
ined. On the platform in mid-garden were other
moonlight pilgrims, and what did they talk about
in face of this glorious apparition, this wonder of
the world? The German professor told how the
mutton chops were served at his hotel— brought in
and passed around sizzling on the hot grill ! Could
sacrilege go further?

There was a British artist at our hotel, "painting
Tajes," as he naively explained, for the "London
spring market"— "four rather nice ones" already
finished, and more to do while the fine weather
lasted; since early in March the hot winds begin,

190 WINTER INDIA

a scorching gale is blowing by noon, and the air is
filled with dust. "Yes, it is a bit chilly sitting in
the garden so long, these days," he said, ''and the
tourists do bother a bit, you know; looking over
one's shoulder and asking one if it is hard to do."
When we hurried from dinner the next night for a
second moonlight view, the artist said : ' ' Oh, I say !
You Americans have such a notion for seeing the Taj
by moonlight. There were some American ladies
here last month at the full of the moon, and they
went down there after dinner, too."

"Have n't you seen it by moonlight yet?"
' ' Oh, dear, no ! I am there all day, you know. ' '
"But are you not going to-night?" we asked in
amazement.

" No, I think not. I will go sometime, though.
It might be nice to paint a moonlight Taj," and he
went on eating cheese!

"With the round silver moon shining high in the
vault of the intense, indigo-blue sky, the Taj Mahal
was the frost-palace of one's dreams, and from the
dark arch of the entrance gateway it seemed fairly
to shine and flash in the strong light poured
full on its eastern face. There was silence in the
enchanted garden, and as we walked toward the
luminous white palace only the far murmur of run-
ning water and the scent of violets and mignonette
told upon the other senses. We had the place to our-
selves for one hour of silence and charm, sitting in
the shadows of the Eesponse. Then the chatter, clat-
ter of the tourist contingent was heard at the gate-
way and down the path. ''Ach, Wunderschon!

AGRA 191

Wunderschon!" the loudest voice proclaimed. Then
clouds skimmed over the moon, dimming the Taj,
which was suddenly transformed to silver and frosted
ivory again as the moon rode out. The '^Wunder-
schun" voices continued down the path until smoth-
ered in the staircase inside the platform, came out
full-lunged on the terrace, and there proclaimed with
greater volume the wonderful beauty of the white
building. Echoes came from the domed hall, then
the faint, glow-worm light of the custodian's lan-
tern led the voluble gutturals around the octagon
and down to the tombs. Next cockney voices came
down the garden walk — some "Tommies" from the
cantonment with their "'Arriets, " who, skylarking
down to the terrace, with an all-hands-round at the
entrance of the platform stairway, chased, shrieking,
up the inner stairway and came out on the platform
with shouts of laughter, each slim, trim figure in
red coat and box cap standing out distinct in color
in the moonlight. Disenchanted, we fled through
the darkest garden paths. It was sacrilege of the
rankest kind for those sweethearting couples to be
skylarking around the marble screen of the tombs,
dropping their barbarous "h's" to summon the echo,
the pure soul of the Taj Mahal,

For four days we haunted the garden of the Taj,
for by noonday, sunset, and moonlight it took on as
many rarer qualities and aspects; and six times a
day, as we drove those long miles to and from the
gateway, we berated the hotel-keepers for not put-
ting the hotel where it should be. The guardians
and keepers at the Taj came to know us, the touts

192 WINTER INDIA

and guides let us alone. We found, after many
comparative tests, that the best full view of the Taj
is to be had from the second story of the entrance
gateway; the best sunset view from the west pavil-
ion over the river angle of the terrace, reached by
a staircase in the mosque ; and the best moonlight
effect is that obtained from the opposite east pa-
vilion, reached by the corresponding stairway in the
Response.

There were Philistines among some of the early
English commanders at Agra, the most soulless of
them all being that Lord William Bentinck who
wanted to sell the Taj Mahal, and actually con-
sidered the offer of thirty thousand pounds from a
rich Hindu. One gasps, too, to hear how the Maha-
raja of Sindhia entertained a viceroy in the en-
chanted garden, serving supper in the Response,
ham and champagne, "swine's flesh and wine," in
the architectural counterpart of the Mosque. Lord
Auckland also was entertained in the Taj, when there
were games in the garden, with roars of laughter,
and ham and champagne again in the Response. In
the same way, a ball was given for Lord Ellenborough
after the siege of Kabul, lanterns were strung on the
cypress-trees, there was dancing to military music on
the marble platform, and supper in the Response, as
usual. The native press denounced this desecration
of a tomb and place of worship, but the Agra officials
argued that the Response was not a mosque, and, if
it were, it had long since lost sanctity by its desecra-
tion by Jats and Hindus. Moreover, they said that
the literal translation of its name was "the feast-

AGRA 193

place"— it was before the tomb was built, Tatar
and Mogul alike preparing a beautiful garden in
life that it might become their burial-place, after
which it was never used for pleasuring, but given
over to the care of priests. The Taj Mahal was held
in great reverence in Mohammedan days, and visitors
were blindfolded at the entrance and not uncovered
until they reached the place of prayer. When the
Jats took Agra and looted its palaces, they carried
off the entrance gates with their thousands of silver
nails, each with a rupee as its head. They took away
the inner doors of the Taj, each a single translucent
slab of agate, the gold spire and crescent, and the
precious carpets laid three and four deep on the
floor. No vandalism of that kind has taken place
in British days, and there has been great interest
shown in keeping the gardens in their original con-
dition. In 1876 the whole place was thoroughly
repaired and restored in preparation for the Prince
of Wales's visit, and the closest watch is kept to pre-
vent natives, soldiers, and tourists from picking out
the precious bits of inlaid stone. Severe punish-
ment is visited upon natives who pick flowers or
otherwise transgress within the inclosure, and the
query was always in my mind whether or not the
natives had any comprehension of the beauty and
sentiment of the place. It was ever a growing
wonder that these people, the Hindus, had ever ac-
complished it— how even twenty-two thousand of
them, working for seventeen or for twenty-two years
under Moslem directors, had ever reared it. Like
Sir Charles Dilke, one finds it hard to believe that

194 WINTER INDIA

"a people who paint their cows pink with green
spots, and their houses orange or bright red, should
be the authors of the Pearl Mosque or the Taj. It
would be too wonderful." It is easier to credit the
plans to the Frenchman Austin de Bordeaux or to
any of the master masons or carvers who came from
Bagdad, Constantinople, Samarkand, and from every
Moslem center of note, and worked here during the
same years that the Pilgrim Fathers were building
their first log-house on Plymouth Bay.

Driving through the great fortress gate, we saw
first the red palace of Akbar, sandstone prelude to
the jeweled marble halls of Shah Jahan, the great-
est builder of all the Moguls. The first or private
audience-hall, the Khas Mahal, lies across the Grape
Garden, its windows set in the solid battlemented
walls that rise sheer from the moats. It is a dream
in white — arches and walls of pure white marble
carved in scrolls, traceries, and flowers in low relief,
the windows filled with marble lattices. The scheme
of white on white is offset by a ceiling of gold and
colors, and the Khas Mahal is a model for architects
and decorators for all time. By an open terrace
on the battlements, and a series of marble halls with
walls inlaid with graceful Persian arabesques and
flowers in colored stones, we came to the Jasmine
Tower, Shah Jahan 's finest construction. The
rounded balcony of the tower projects beyond the
walls and commands the moats below, the long curve
of the Jumna, and the white bubbles of the Taj be-
yond a flat, green foreground of river bottom mo-
saiced over with the washermen 's white patches. The

AGRA 195

lovely Mumtaz-i-Mahal livi'd in thei?e rooms around
the fountain court, all their surface a maze of pre-
cious inlay, the floor of the court a marble pachisi-
board, the walls of the inner chambers fitted with
long, sunken pockets for jewels that only a woman's
slender hand and wrist could reach into. A stair-
case leads down to the Shish Mahal, or Hall of Mir-
rors, a cool grotto of a bath set with tiny mirrors in
carved plaster, where a cascade once tinkled down
a stepped arrangement over colored lights. Over-
head is the tiny Gem Mosque, where the women
prayed the Prophet to grant them souls; this ex-
quisite marble cell being afterward the prison place
of Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan, the accepted Great
Mogul of Europeans, and contemporary of Crom-
well, was deposed by his son, Jahangir, but cheered in
his seven years' captivity by his faithful daughter,
Jahanira. Another passage leads along above the
battlements from the Jasmine Tower to the Diwan-i-
Khas, another private audience-hall with an inner
decoration of white on white in low relief, the outer
pillars and arches inlaid with color. A considerable
annual outlay is required to keep these inlaid walls
in order, to replace the bits of carnelian, jade, jas-
per, amethyst, agate, and lapis lazuli dug out by
vicious tourists and idling hooligans of soldiers.
This audience-hall fronts upon a terrace flush with
the battlements, and there at close of day the Great
Mogul used to lounge on a black marble throne,
watching the domes and minarets of the Taj grow
beneath the hands of the thousands of workmen.
When the marauding Jats captured the fort they

196 WINTER INDIA

sacked the palace, despoiled the Di\van-i-Khas of its
silver ceiling, but when they attempted to sit on this
seat of the Great Mogul it broke under the indig-
nity. Half of the court space was once a sunken
pond, with a carved niche or throne in the sur-
rounding gallery, where the great one used to sit
to fish at ease. It is now but a dry stone court, and
no trace remains of the bath-room of precious green
marble, whose interior was stripped by the Marquis
of Hastings, who wished to send it to England to
be reerected as a bath-room for George IV. The
loose marbles lay around for years, uncared for,
and were finally sold for a trifle. It is not necessary
for any outsider to vent his indignation at this bar-
baric proceeding, as Sir James Fergusson has said
it all, with a vehemence none can approach, and has
sufiSciently laid the lash of his terrible sarcasm on
his Philistine countrymen.

From this Court of the Fish-pond a door admits
one directly to the Diwan-i-Am, or great audience-
hall, its marble lattices and inlaid throne splendid
reminders of the past, the rows of British cannon
and the red-coated sentries beyond sufficient evi-
dences of the present. We crossed the court and
ascended the staircase to the Moti Musjid, the Pearl
Mosque, over which three generations of writers
have raved as an architectural chef -d 'ceuvre second
only to the Taj. After all the splendid creations
of Shah Jahan, this in some way failed to produce
an equal impression, and it gave us a distinct sense
of disappointment. The simplicity of the white
mosque, relieved only by the blue and gray veins

AGRA 199

of the marble and the one long inscription in
black inlay, did not appeal. The white court with
its mirror tank, the white cloisters, the vista of
white arches and columns, and the pale shadows of
the interior had beauty,— Vereshchagin's painting
had told one that,— but the Moti Musjid gave the
chill of the first disappointment in Agra.

The tomb of I 'tamadu-daulah, father of Nur Ja-
han, the famous wife of Jahangir, and grandfather
of Mumtaz-i-Mahal, is on the opposite side of the
Jumna; far above the Taj and from the high rail-
way bridge and from the garden terraces one has
still different views of the Taj. All the roads lead-
ing there were crowded one Sunday afternoon with
strings of ekkas and bullock-carts overflowing with
women and children, and the garden-paths and the
marble platform around the marquetry tomb of
the Persian treasurer were crowded with family par-
ties. The women and children were all in their most
brilliant holiday attire, their jewels and tinsel, fan-
tastic fineries and fripperies of every kind making
the green garden around the white pavilion a dazzle
of color, a dream of India. Complacent fathers sat
stocking-footed on outspread blankets, their veiled
women and children, huddled near, regarding the
superior being with awe — a joyous Indian family
holiday of the middle classes. A small boy flashed
by in a petunia satin coat and gold-embroidered
cap, bare-legged and tugging at a bow and arrow.
Another boy in gorgeous red satin top-clothes
munched a green apple, and the petunia archer flew
at him with the fury of a tiger. Screams from the

200 WINTER INDIA

combatants and all their female followers rent the
air, and when forcibly separated neither was to be
appeased by proffered peanuts. Then a small sister
of the petunia coat dashed forward and dealt the
green-apple boy such a clap on the ear that the
female parliament was paralyzed. When we pre-
sented the intrepid little woman with some annas of
admiration our dumfounded bearer asked, "Why
do such curious thing?" and afterward tried half-
heartedly to explain to the crouching women that it
was our testimonial to the first woman in India with
any backbone. With laughter, the four wives, the
two daughters, and the wrinkled old nurse in pew-
ter jewelry, who were with the father of the little
"new woman," promised to keep her in the habit of
resenting tyrant man and redressing promptly all
the wrongs that came to her notice.

The garden rang with jingling anklets, and the
play of colors was kaleidoscopic. Two beautiful
young women raised their white head-sheets to look
at us as they passed, red shoes and full yellow skirts
and much coin jewelry making them fantastic fig-
ures fit for a fancy-dress ball. Scores of women
flounced by in red skirts, green skirts, changeable
silk skirts with tinsel borders, and wearing purple,
green, yellow, and white head-sheets. A nautch-
girl came jingling by, her pale-blue skirts the only
touch of that color in the whole garden. After
we had seen the tombs in the mosaic pavilion,
whose inlaid walls were the first to be decorated in
pietra dura in India, we mounted to the terrace roof
around the upper story of the marble reliquary,

AGRA 201

which is a mass of fine relief-carving and lattice-
work, and looked down upon the brilliant scene
in the garden. And this spectacular gathering of
so many hundreds of women and children was all
to celebrate the ceremonial hair-cutting of the year
—the clippings of the children's hair being brought
to the terrace and there thrown into the Jumna, with
flower offerings.

CHAPTER XV

AKBAR, THE GREATEST MOGUL OF THEM ALL

T Agra, Akbar, the greatest of all the
Mogul sovereigns, descendant of Baber
and Timur, and of tribal connec-
tion with Genghis Khan, becomes a
very real personage. He lived in that
age of great sovereigns when Henry IV, Philip II,
and Queen Elizabeth ruled in Europe. He has been
called the Marcus Aurelius and the Frederick the
Great of India, and he was the greatest builder the
country had then known. Forts, palaces, tombs,
and whole cities sprang up by his command, and at
his court literature, art, and all religions were hon-
ored. Brahmans, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Jains, and
Catholic priests expounded and argued with him
in a first parliament of religions, and, regarding
them all impartially, he devised a universal theology,
a compromise creed which his vizier and not a few
courtiers adopted. He himself worshiped the sun
every morning, as representative of the divinity
which animates and rules the world. He was a
strenuous sort of ruler too, walking twenty and
thirty miles a day, to the dismay of his courtiers;
and once he rode from Ajmir to Agra in two days,

202

AKBAR, THE GREATEST MOGUL OF THEM ALL 203

covering the two hundred and twenty miles by innu-
merable relays of fast horses. Akbar wrote his mem-
oirs, in worthy emulation of Baber, whose autobiog-
raphy in illuminated Persian text is treasured in the
Agra College library.

In the usual reverse order of all Indian sight-see-
ing, we first saw Akbar 's tomb, and then his City
of Victory. The tomb is at Secundra, a suburb of
Agra. A great red sandstone gateway admits one to
the flagged court, and the impressive pillared pa-
vilion, rising story upon story, after the oldest Bud-
dhist constructions, covers the remains of the great-
est of the Moguls. A pierced marble screen walls
the upper terrace, where the white sarcophagus, cov-
ered with carving, lies open to the sun and sky,
the intended white dome never having been com-
pleted by Akbar 's successors. The real tomb is
reached by a sloping passageway, and the monarch
lies in a grave scooped in the earth like the graves
of his desert-chief ancestors.

Never on any sleigh-ride, nor in winter travel in
the North, have I known such suffering from cold as
during the twenty-two-mile ride from Agra to Fateh-
pur Sikri, Akbar 's City of Victory. The heaviest
winter clothing and all the wraps, rugs, razais, and
hot-water bottles could not defy the insidious air.
The sun shone, the trees were green, the road was
smooth and well kept, but the keen, raw, icy wind
of a Canadian March so benumbed us on our way
to Akbar 's Versailles that several times we ran be-
side the victoria in our efforts to restore circula-
tion. We paused not for sights when once ar-

204 WINTER INDIA

rived there. "What were Akbar's outer walls, his
treasury, mint, or any lot of ruined stonework to
us until we could reach the cold splendors of the
dak bangia, once the Record Office and Akbar's
House of Dreams, and thaw our fingers over the
cook-house charcoals? We shut the mullioned win-
dows in the cliff-like outer walls commanding the
vast prospect of the plain, and supplemented the
slight and shadowy, the sketchy, impressionist im-
itation of a breakfast of the Agra hotel with scald-
ing chocolate and really hot toast, and embarked
the sjonpathetic old khansamah on a more solid
tiffin than he had contemplated. AVe proposed to
stoke up with all the bodily fuel possible for the
return drive in the teeth of the wind.

A troop of guides lay in wait for us, and luck
let us have another of those stupid parrots who,
in embroidered caps and winding chuddas, mis-
lead one over all the show-places of India. This one
stuttered— may all others know and avoid him by
that sign!— and, like all of his gild, reversed the
guide-book order of sight-seeing. We had already
suffered enough in that way, and we ordered him
to right about face and march to the Turkish
queen's house, first on the Murray list and first
object before the Hall of Records. ''But, lady-
ship, I wish f-f-first to sh-sh-show you the mosque
and my ancestor's grave." But we wanted none
of his ancestors, except in their regular order.
"Oh, your ladyship, your ladyship, take me, take
me. God is good. Take me, take me," mumbled a
toothless collection of wrinkles in white grave-clothes.

AKBAR, THE GREATEST MOGUL OF THEM ALL 205

"I know the palace well. I know the Turkish
queen. I showed the Prince of Wales all Fateh-
pur Sikri. ' ' And then guides grew thick and thicker
around us, rising from the very flagstones. They
whined in procession after us across the court, and
it was easy to make compact with our guide, who
was almost exploding with spasms of stuttering
wrath at the interlopers. He was to lead us in
the straight and direct path of the "Murray book,"
and receive bakshish in proportion to his success
in keeping his rivals away and in omitting his "lady-
ships."

As we wandered in admiration through the sun-
warmed courts, sheltered from the biting blast, our
benumbed senses revived, and we warmed to real
enthusiasm over this "romance in stone," over all
the exquisite fantasies, the veritable maisons hijoux
Akbar had built for his favorite wives. The Great
Mogul was as eclectic and as far-reaching in his con-
sort collecting as in his religion, and we were shown
the house of his Turkish queen Miriam; that of his
Christian Portuguese wife ; the house of Birbal, his
Hindu wife, and a great zenana. Of the same order
of lavish ornamentation is the wonderful council-
chamber with its central pillar, all these structures
carved over every inch of surface with the finest
and most intricate ornament, geometrical patterns,
and traceries. Outside, inside, over all the walls and
ceilings spreads the revel of ornament, and the win-
dows hold perforated stone and marble screens as
fine as woven reed-work. This was the real In-
dia of the imagination, the setting for "The Nau-

206 WINTER INDIA

lahka," every part of the carved labyrinth a scene
for melodrama. There was one great five-story
pavilion, strangely like Akbar's tomb in design, each
pillared and open hall of fairy lightness, with a
row of fantastic bell-cupolas on top. There the
zenana women took the air, and near by was Akbar 's
great pachisi-board inlaid in a court pavement,
where he played the game with his vizier, using
slave-girls for pawns, and the successful one keeping
the beauties he won. On the seat overlooking this
checker-board, Akbar doubtless flourished his fa-
mous bon-bon box, with its harmless delights in one
compartment, perfumed poison in the other. After
having dealt death to many courtiers deliberately,
he accidentally took the wrong sugar-plum himself
one day, and ended his life in the most satisfactory,
retributive, story-book way.

Our guide finally led us through the inlaid gate
to the court of the mosque, and was about to launch
full-lunged on his ancestors of honorable burial
when our eyes fell upon the little white marble tomb
of Selim Chisti, the hermit saint and local genius,
whose prophecies led Akbar to build this palace and
city on the arid plain. The saint's tomb is the most
exquisite thing of its kind in India, a tiny marble
jewel-box, hardly larger than an elephant's howdah,
a filigree reliquary, with fine lattice walls, fantastic
brackets, and a domed roof shining in the sunlight.
The ebony doors admit one to the tomb, where os-
trich eggs hang and ebony panels are inlaid with
mother-of-pearl. One looks through the marble
screens, as fine as basketry, at the Indian sky, as

AKBAR, THE GREATEST MOGUL OF THEM ALL 209

clearly blue as sapphire. We forgot the inlaid arches
and the tiled facings of the mosque, which is a copy
of the mosque at Mecca, and turned only to look
again and again at the tiny white tomb shining like
a frost creation in the empty stone court, the reality
infinitely more satisfactory than even Vereshcha-
gin's painting had led us to expect. In front of this
little prettiness the great gate of Victory opens to
the plain and the ruined city, a broad staircase lead-
ing down to the rubbish-strewn common. We went
through the great domed arch, the doors studded
with votive nail-heads and horseshoes, and from the
foot of the staircase had the intended view of this
gate which Fergusson calls "noble beyond that of
any portal attached to any mosque in India, perhaps
in the whole world." Across the front of this gate
Akbar inlaid the famous inscription : ' ' Isa [Jesus] ,
on whom be peace, said : ' The world is a bridge, pass
over it, but build no house on it. The world endures
but an hour, spend it in devotion. ' " There is a great
green, oval well, with a parapet and arched chambers
surrounding it, close beside the steps and the high,
battlemented walls. Despite the keen and wintry
air, lean men and boys, shivering in a few flutters
of cotton drapery, offered to jump the eighty feet
from the battlements into the well. While we de-
murred, covered with goose-flesh at the mere idea,
there was a shout from above, a brown figure shot
out into the air, whirling his arms frantically to
keep the body upright, and dropped feet foremost
into the pool. The green scum closed over him, and
before we could recover breath the black head swam

210 WINTER INDIA

to the steps, wound on a dry sheet, and came, all
green and shivering, to claim a rupee for the feat.
He dashed instantly out of sight, reappeared on the
battlements, and made a second plummet drop
into the well. Only the fact that those two dearly
earned rupees assured him food for the day could
ease one's conscience for aiding and abetting such
inhuman sport. Two Scotch tourists, who had
watched the cold plunger from the head of the steps,
refused to pay a rupee apiece, or even one anna, to
the "poor man with family to feed." We could
hear them say that they had not engaged the man
to jump, the ladies had arranged that. "But you
saw me. You watched me. You all looked at me,"
howled the jumper, following them. And the Scotch-
men said: "Those Americans can just pay more,
then. We won't give you an anna. Jao!"

After the arctic drive back to Agra, we had time
only for a cup of scalding tea before hurrying to
the Taj to witness the most wonderful sunset of
all, an amber afterglow illuminating every inner
curve and recess and dispelling all shadows, the light
seeming to radiate from the glowing marble, to
emanate from the white surface itself. As if that
six-mile pilgrimage, added to our forty-four-mile
drive of the day, were not enough, the clear sparkle
of the stars and the nipping air of that night sug-
gested a different Taj, and after dinner we rattled
down the Strand Road to see by moonlight such a
glitteringly white, splendidly snowy frost-palace as
we had not dreamed of finding in India.

We essayed a rainy day of rest, taking our ease

AKBAR, THE GREATEST MOGUL OF THEM ALL 211

at our inn, myself in a superior, sunless, fireless,
cheerless room, which was but a long, whitewashed
vault with a carefully curtained door opening on
a brick portico. Drafts that were small gales
blew through, making reading, writing, or anything
but sneezing impossible. The peddlers marked us
for their own that day, and every few moments there
was a tap on the glass door, a brown hand was thrust
in with some object for sale; and a plaintive "mem-
sahib" or "ladyship" distracted one. "Please buy.
Please buy. I am poor man," rang in my ears all
day, and the transfer of packs from the bricks out-
side to the dirty matting within was accomplished
imperceptibly. I was first aware of some pleading,
whining creature with a shop spread on the floor
around him— silver, jewelry, embroideries, shawls,
beetle-winged gauzes, gay pulkharries, and souvenir
spoons. Every day a huge damascened fork or tri-
dent was offered me as I passed in or out, — whether
a dagger or an elephant goad I could not say. "Oh,
yes, your ladyship," said the oily one in answer,
"this is toast-fork. Very nice. Very comfortable
thing for traveling. Please buy. I am poor man."
But he and his tribe were ordered to begone, and
as the toast-master shuffled out with his bundle he
paused at the threshold to slip into his Mohamme-
dan shoes, using the big fork for a shoe-horn.
"Very useful. See, your ladyship," he said, adjust-
ing the second shoe with the combination toasting-
fork, "Silputs [slippers] help on, also."

When the sky cleared in the late afternoon we
betook ourselves to the fort to await the rose-red

212 WINTER INDIA

sunset that the humid atmosphere promised. The
old chuprassy welcomed us to the Jasmine Tower,
and gave us wicker stools that we might comfortably
watch the white bubbles beyond the green fore-
ground flame to rose-red and then fade away, effaced
in the gray mists that rolled up the river, presage
of the deluge rain that followed. The keeper brought
torches and led us down to the labyrinth of dark
chambers and vaults that underlie the zenana and
the Grape Garden. Six thousand people found ref-
uge in the fort during the Mutiny, and then all this
underground world was explored, with its oubliettes
and long passages reaching to the moats and the
water-gate. The rooms we saw were the prisons for
zenana offenders, and by dumb show and much
mixed language we were informed that it was Ak-
bar's wives who suffered most often here by torture
and the rope, the sack, and the drop down the echo-
ing well. No screams could be heard in the sunny
Grape Garden, nor in the beautiful audience-hall;
and, after Akbar's career of domestic tyranny, it
was fitting that his son, Jahangir, should be ruled
by his Persian wife, Nur Jahan, and that Shah
Jahan, the grandson, should worship in life, and
after her death, Mumtaz-i-Mahal.

CHAPTEK XVI

DELHI

,T was in the regular order of discomfort
that we should leave Agra late at night

and reach Delhi at four o'clock in the
|V morning; the last straw lay in the

fact that we departed in a pouring
rain and made the midnight change at Tundla
Junction in a cloud-burst. Fires had warmed the
rooms (which we reached by a roof or terrace)
when we arrived at the much commended Delhi
hotel, and we fell asleep to dream of Madura
noondays until an unusual hour of the morning.
Then we found that the rooms had no windows,
so that when the doors were closed and the fire-
places heaped with wood, we had easily enjoyed
the climate of the tropics. That hotel, named for
a great viceroy, was by far the worst, the most for-
lorn, run-dowTi, and dilapidated of any we found
up-country. The drawing-room was a muddle of
broken furniture, of dusty and disorderly draperies,
the dining-room infragrant and time-stained, and
the manager— there are no landlords or innkeepers
in British realms any more— a listless, depressed,
poor white creature, a definite failure in life, who

213

214 WINTER INDIA

roamed the portico in pajamas and long ulster,
smoking a German student pipe. We removed forth-
with to another hotel, that had once been a splendid
official residence. Our rooms opened by long win-
dows upon a cement terrace flush with the battle-
ments of the city walls, and from that high para-
pet we looked down upon the Jumna and green
wooded spaces where the jackals howled all night
and wherein are laid some of the scenes of "On
the Face of the Waters." The entrance portico
of the mansion was used as a dining-room, the great
stone arches partly closed at night by bamboo blinds,
ventilated curtains that swayed and swung in the
drafts and breezes which blew over us as we dined
there, practically out of doors, on those cold Janu-
ary nights, with the humidity great and the ther-
mometer registering 38 to 40 degrees.

"It is a land of misery," cried a great American
litterateur who was doing India with a rapidity un-
equaled by any personally conducted tourist. "All
I want to do is to get out of it ; to get away ; to get
something an American stomach is used to eating;
to get some Apollinaris instead of this hygienic soda ;
to get warm again. If I get within one hundred
miles of any place, I will say I have seen it. I don't
want any more architecture at this price." And
this tirade was in the same key and vein indulged in
by all the coughing, sneezing, rheumatic, and neu-
ralgic tourists. All were cross, half ill, and thor-
oughly homesick in this chill land of supposed
tropic splendors.

When the sour mists or the frost hazes of those

DELHI 215

Delhi mornings had cleared away, we had sunshine
that mellowed grumblers to amiability, and they
basked in the hot beams of noonday; but gloom
settled on them with the damp chill of sunset, and
there were the same depressed and depressing groups
huddled before the few hissing twigs in the fireplaces
of the chill white caves of rooms. Then the jackals
came under our windows and laughed and shrieked
hysterically, as well they might, at calling such a
tour pleasure travel.

The old capital of the Moguls has great charm
in sunshine, and Delhi's main thoroughfare, the
Chandni Chauk (Silver Square), was the most bril-
liant and spectacular place we had seen. All native
life was crowded into that street, which is a contin-
uous market-place for a mile, with rainbow crowds
of people streaming up and down, buying and selling
everything from crown diamonds and jeweled jade
to sheepskins and raw meat. The street has run
with blood many times, and has been strewn and
stacked with corpses. Nadir Shah put one hundred
thousand to death, Timur had done worse, and the
IMahrattas were the worst of all; so that the
butchery after the Mutiny siege of Delhi was but an-
other regrettable incident in its history. At the far
end of the street towers the red sandstone gateway
of Shah Jahan's fort, and driving in under this
portal fit for kings and triumphal armies, we found
sepoys lounging on charpoys by the guard-house
door, tunics unbuttoned, turbans awry and at loose
ends, and INIoslem shoes hanging from one bare toe
— the sa7is gene of the race undisturbed by the noble

12

216 WINTER INDIA

environment or the contrasting presence of the
tramping sentry on duty, turbaned and accoutred
to perfection, spindle legs wound with smooth put-
ties, and the enormous English shoes blacked to a
drill-sergeant's dream. Such loungers at the guard-
house door are on view at every show fort and
palace in India, incongruous, disillusioning, but
thereby the real thing. Incongruity is the regular
order in India, splendor and shabbiness, dirt and
riches, luxury and squalor always going together.
We were free to roam the courts and garden spaces
of the palace unhindered, from Shah Jahan's open
audience-hall, or music-room, with its panels of
Florentine mosaic on black marble ground, to that
inner throne-room, the most splendid in the world.
This peerless Diwan-i-Khas, one mass of rich deco-
ration from the inlaid floor to the golden ceiling,
was worthy setting for the Peacock Throne. The
renegade Frenchman or Italian who planned the
palaces of Shah Jahan, and the skilled workmen
brought from all the centers of Mohammedan lux-
ury, made the Delhi palace equal in decorative
details to the Agra palace and the Taj. "If
there is on earth an Eden of bliss, it is this,
it is this, it is this," was appropriately inlaid in
Persian letters in this throne-room, whose square
columns, arches, spandrils, frieze, and moldings
are decorated with exquisite pietra dura. A small
dais shows where stood the Peacock Throne, that
low, square chair completely sheathed in rubies,
pearls, diamonds, emeralds, and other stones, the
Koh-i-nur one of the peacock's eyes, and a life-sized

DELHI 217

parrot cut from a single emerald its crowning orna-
ment. That fabled emerald parrot, like the so-called
emerald Buddha at Bangkok, was undoubtedly noth-
ing but a very fine and clear piece of /'ti tsui jade,
but it went with all the other loot that Nadir Shah
carried away in 1739— loot the value of which
amounted to thirty-eight million pounds, and which
was scattered by the Kurds when he was murdered.
India was drained of its riches then, for no good
end. After Nadir Shah had gone his way with
the Peacock and nine other jeweled thrones, this
palace suffered neglect as well as sacking. When
Lord Auckland's sisters saw it in 1838, the old
King of Delhi sat in a neglected garden, his own
dirty soldiers lounged on dirty charpoys in the beau-
tiful inlaid bath-rooms, and the precious inlays were
being stolen, bit by bit, from the rooms of the
princes. One regrets the destruction that f (flowed
the Mutiny, when the zenana and whole labyrinths
of guest-rooms were torn away to make space for
barracks. Sir James Fergusson has dealt with these
destroying British barbarians very thoroughly in
"Indian and Eastern Architecture" (Vol. II, p. 208),
and hands on to immortality the name of Sir John
Jones, who tore up the platform of the Peacock
Throne and divided it into sections which he sold as
table-tops, the pair now in the India Museum at
London having fetched him five hundred pounds.

The audience-halls, the baths, and the rooms
around the Diwan-i-Khas were repaired and restored
at great expense in preparation for the Prince of
Wales's visit in 1876, and close watchfulness has

218 WINTER INDIA

maintained them in that condition. One can only
wish that for completeness' sake a glass copy of the
Peacock Throne might be installed in the original's
place. Tourists would gladly contribute their annas
to that worthy end.

The Jama Mas j id, the largest and certainly the
most imposing mosque in India, lifts its minarets
across a great park where troops of great apes race
madly, alert for the pious Hindus, whom one often
sees ostentatiously feeding them inferior boiled rice,
"to acquire merit." The great gateway of the
mosque, high on a terraced platform, is second only
to Akbar's Gate of Victory, and, opening formerly
only for the Mogul emperor, swings widely now
when the Viceroy visits it. On Friday mornings
ten and twelve thousand people worship there ; in fes-
tival times four times as many assemble. The priests
are friendly, and in one of the lesser minarets show
one richly illuminated copies of the Koran, Moham-
med's slipper filled with jasmine blossoms, and finally
one henna-red hair from the beard of the Prophet.
There is a busy market around the steps of the great
gateway on certain days, when grotesque two-story
camel-wagons bring in country produce ; dealers in
poultry hold one side of the terrace steps and bird-
fanciers the other. We had eaten mutton-chops
from Tuticorin northward, but had never seen a live
sheep until we heard its familiar voice by Jama
Mas j id's steps. But what flocks of goats we had
seen in pastures, on country roads and city streets!
"It is poultry," said the bearer as we regarded the
fat-tailed sheep with curiosity, his application of

KUTAB MINAK,

DELHI 221

the word ''poultry" meaning tame or domestic as
distinguished from ''jungle," which defines a wild
fowl or animal. "Yes, the peacock is poultry," he
answered quickly, but when we inquired about the
elephants and camels standing round he hesitated.
"Yes. Certainly. The elephant once was jungle,
and the camble too ; but now they both are poultry."

The little Jain temple and the Black Temple of
the Hindus are sanctuaries of other Delhi sects,
but we forgot conventional sights and the rivalry
of religions when we met a wedding procession in
the labyrinth of streets in that quarter. The horses
wore gold, silver, and jeweled bridles, head-stalls
and necklaces to match, and gold-embroidered cloths
and trappings. The bridegroom's brother was a
dazzling, kincob-clad person, jeweled to distraction,
with wreaths and tassels of jasmine covering him
from crown to waist, and the bridegroom was twice
as splendid. The populace gaped and ran after the
cavalcade, and half-naked beggars tiocked with ex-
tended palms. ' ' Jao ! Jao ! ' ' said the bridegroom 's
brother in a voice to make a policeman tremble ; and
swish! came his jeweled whip on the bare shoulders
of one insistent petitioner. With a yelp of pain and
a spiritless whine, the beggar slunk away.

Delhi remains the center of all Indian art indus-
tries. The most skilful jewelers and gem-cutters,
painters, carvers, embroiderers, and craftsmen whose
creations could tempt the purse or minister to the
luxury of the greater and lesser Moguls, have gath-
ered there for centuries, and trade habits are but
slowly broken. Along Chandni Chauk plump mer-

222 WINTER INDIA

chants in snow-white clothes and tiny jeweler's tur-
bans invite one to their white, washed, felt-floored
inner rooms; and there, treading cat-like in stock-
inged feet, they unroll gold and silver embroideries,
Kashmir shawls, and " camble 's-hair " stuffs, and
cover the last inches of floor space with jewels.
Necklaces, girdles, and a queen's ornaments are
drawn from battered boxes, scraps of paper, cotton
cloth, or old flannel. Nothing seems quite as in-
congruous in this land of the misfit and the incon-
gruous as the way in which the jewels of a raja
are produced from old biscuit-tins, pickle-bottles,
and marmalade-jars. One buys the gems of a
temple goddess, and they are laid in grimy cotton-
wool and packed in rusty little tin boxes of a crudity
inconceivable. While on the claim the Klondike
miner considers the makeshift of a baking-powder
box, as a safe deposit for his nuggets and dust, as
a huge joke ; but the Hindu jeweler does it with no
sense of the unfitness of things, of relative propri-
ety in splendor. "Memsahib does not like tin
box? Very well. See!" and the ruby necklace was
wrapped in a bit of newspaper, and put in a broken
pasteboard box that had held a druggist's pre-
scription. When they have covered the floor with
their most valuable stuffs, the shopmen walk over
them without compunction, pull them here and
there, and throw them in heaps into the corners.
When this happens several times a day, and the
traps are bundled to and from the hotels night and
morning, it is small wonder that everything offered
one is mussy, wrinkled, and shop-worn. Despite the

DELHI 223

lures and promises of the toy turban tribe, no
important pieces of carved or jeweled jade were
seen. To them any green stone was jade, and under
that name they brought out serpentine, bowenite,
and chloro-melanite— anything soft and easily
worked that would look as well. Three generations
of one family are no longer employed in carving
one jade bowl, as in Mogul times. Art is fleeting
now, and the lapidaries want quick sales and as
large returns as the tourist's enlightenment permits.
One may handle these Delhi jewels by the hour
and not see a flawless stone, a spherical pearl, or
any string of pearls matched perfectly in size, shape,
skin, or luster ; and one moves in and breathes such
an atmosphere of jewels in Delhi that he soon re-
gards precious stones as the usual, serious accom-
paniment of daily life. A prosaic tourist, never
given to such weaknesses, soon finds himself hanging
and haggling over jewels, buying unset stones and
gewgaws to indiscretion. From the earliest break-
fast hour to the last home-coming at dusk, and until
the train bears him away from the station platform,
open jewel-boxes and rows of necklaces spread on
cloths or shawl-ends are put before him. Some in-
sinuating Lai This or Lai That, with caste-marked
brow and tiny turban, is always salaaming and beg-
ging him to buy his blue ferozees (turquoises), or
necklaces of the nine lucky stones. A tap at the
door, and it opens to show a brown face and a tassel
of necklaces swinging from a brown hand ; and in
time the victim is hypnotized by the glittering ob-
jects. There is bitter trade rivalry among the jew-

224 WINTER INDIA

elers and their touts, and one cannot visit the shop
or buy of one of the Lais without being denounced
and upbraided for partiality by all the other Lais.
"Please come my shop. Please buy my shop. I am
only honest man. I am poor man," said one oily
tongue, putting his fingers to his mouth in dumb
show of rice-eating. "Yes, yes," we said to the
importunate as we drove away from the hotel, and
a fierce-eyed, viper ish-looking Hindu made a flying
leap to the other step of the carriage and hissed:
"Don't go his shop. He is bad man. He cheat.
He lie. His ferozees are all glass, chalk. I speak
true. I am honest man. I have true stones. I am
poor man. Please buy my shop." An emphatic
" Jao !" made him drop away from the carriage step.
Winding up his loose end of red shawl, he went back
to the door-step and squatted there in apparent fra-
ternity with the wicked rival— both blood-brothers
in lying and cheating, both waiting for fresh prey,
the tourist the righteous victim for such swindlers
in all countries.

After much looking and comparing, a friend of
that Indian winter bought a ruby necklace, and
as she stowed it away in her inside strong pocket
her particular Lai said, "Please, ladyship, do not
show any one here in Delhi. Let no man know that
I have sold, that you have bought my 'niklass.'
Those bad fellows at hotel do something if they
know I sell." We strolled for an hour along the
Chandni Chauk, when we were met by our servant
with a closed carriage and drove to the Ridge. As
the horses slowed down for the long hill climb,

DELHI 225

the box was opened for a look at the new purchase.
Hardly had the owner wound it over her hand,
when the kincob turban and viper countenance of
the rival jeweler was thrust in the open window.
There was an "Ah" of such venomous rage that we
screamed in alarm. The head vanished, and this
sleuth-hound of jewelers, who had shadowed us all
day and clung to the back of the carriage, was seen
speeding like a deer back to the city.

"Oh, I found Delhi so sad, so depressing. All
those scenes of the Mutiny, you know— the Kashmir
Gate and the Eidge, don't you know. It was so
terrible that I was really glad to get away," said
an English visitor. The ruby collar and the detec-
tive jeweler had put us beyond any depression inci-
dent to the visit to the Ridge, familiar as is its his-
tory when one has read Lord Roberts's "Forty-one
Years in India" and Mrs. Steele's "On the Face of
the Waters." At Delhi, too, one feels that there
have been too many sieges and reliefs in these later
days for the events of 1857 to be dinned into one
quite so endlessly. Newspaper readers are all stra-
tegical experts now, and they balance and measure
the horrors and heroisms of the siege of Delhi against
the modern ones; match the storming of the Kash-
mir Gate with the glorious storming of the South
Gate of Tientsin and of the East Gate of Peking
by the Japanese in the China campaign of 1900.

From the Ridge one looks down upon the great
plain where the annual camp of exercise, or the
great military manoeuvers, are held each year. The
great durbar or Delhi meeting of 1877 was held on

226 WINTER INDIA

this same plain, when Lord Lytton proclaimed the
Queen of England as Empress of India in the pres-
ence of all the feudatory princes and an assemblage
of more than one hundred thousand people. The
plain was the scene also of the greater durbar of
1903, when Lord Curzon proclaimed King Edward
VII of England as Emperor of India, with a pagean-
try and splendor unapproached in modern times, —
the most magnificent state ceremony that has ever
been seen.

CHAPTER XVII

OLD DELHI

NE gets the full sense of antiquity in
driving south from Delhi for eleven
miles over a plain strewn with the
ruins of seven earlier cities that pre-
ceded this modern Delhi, or Shah Ja-
hanabad. Dwellings have crumbled away, but forts
and tombs have withstood the ages, and there is a very
feast of graveyards all the way to the Kutab minar.
Hoariest of all the memorials is the carved stone col-
umn of Asoka (240 B.C.), inscribed with the Buddha's
precepts a-gainst the taking of life, and which stands
in Tughlak's ruined fort at Firozabad. At ruined
Indrapat are the remains of the lovely inlaid
mosque and the tall tower from which the emperor
Humayum fell while studying the stars ; and near
by is the splendid red sandstone mausoleum erected
for him by his widow and his son Akbar. A cen-
tury after its erection, this domed tomb of Huma-
yum furnished the model for the Taj Mahal, and one
quickly notes the main points of resemblance between
this massive red building and the white dream at
Agra. Humayum 's tomb stands upon the same sort
of high platform, but lacks the slender minarets

227

228 WINTER INDIA

at the corners. The red building and its white
marble dome are larger than the more delicately
modeled, the more ornate, poetic, and feminine
structure at Agra. The last scene of the Mutiny-
was played here when Hobson's men overtook Baha-
dur Shah, the fugitive Delhi king, and returned the
next day for the princes, shot them, and exposed
their bodies in the blood-soaked, corpse-strewn
Chandni Chauk. Bahadur Shah lived in exile at
Rangoon for forty years, and his son, childless and
born in exile, a harmless nonentity, was permitted
to return to India for the durbar of 1903.

At Humayum's tomb we left the tree-bordered
Muttra road, where camel-wagons and strings of
donkeys moved phantom-like through the dusty
frost haze : the air so very sharp that one wondered
how pipul- and tamarind-trees could retain their
foliage. The revel of death and ruins, the feast of
tombs and mortuary architecture, continued for
miles, the names of the honored dead conveying no
idea of personality, having no association of indi-
viduality to one, all this past so vague and unfa-
miliar that one moralizes, like Omar, on the vanity
of man. One at last identifies four tombs— that
of Akbar's brother, that of the Chisti saint, that of
a Persian poet and that of the unhappy emperor Mo-
hammed Shah, last occupant of the Peacock Throne
so thoroughly despoiled by Nadir Shah. The saint,
who was something of a juggler and miracle-worker,
a Mohammedan mahatma, rests in a little white
jewel-box of marble, whose red awnings give a
comforting color-note to the chill court. The saint

OLD DELHI 229

built a woll guaranteed not to drown any one wlio
leaped into it, and a lean boy in a tattered sheet
begged us to see him jump. "One rupee— only
one rupee, memsahib. Ek rupia.'" He fell, anna by
anna, to half that price. We shivered in furs to think
of a cold plunge in that icy air and keen wind, and
finally bargained, in the presence of the priest, to
give him six annas if he would go home, put on more
clothes, and not jump that day. One crazy foreigner
more or less, with notions crazier than the last one,
could not disturb a molla; but as it was past his
prophesying what we might not pay six annas for, in
the course of our crass philanthropy, he himself con-
ducted us about and to the tomb of Khusrau, " the
sweet-singing parrot of India, memsahib. ' ' Khusrau
was a Turk, but his Persian verses were so beautiful
that Sadi made a pilgrimage from Persia to pay hom-
age, and to this day all the gild of Delhi musicians
and dancers remember him with garlands and bou-
quets. In this group of tombs is that of Jahanira,
the daughter of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz-i-Mahal,
who is a very real personage. Her years of devotion
to her blind and captive father, her long life of
piety and goodness, dying unmarried at the age of
sixty-seven, warranted her burial in the Taj Mahal,
or the Jama Mas j id at Agra, built especially for her,
rather than with that mixed but interesting com-
pany in the suburbs of Delhi.

The most beautiful tomb of them all is that of
Mirza Jahangir, Akbar's son,— a platform of white
marble supporting a white marble screen, with heavy
doors of marble carved in low relief, likewise the

230 WINTER INDIA

lintels, cornice, and base— a dream of decoration, a
symphony in white. Near by is another arrange-
ment in white marble in low relief and latticework
surrounding unhappy Mohammed, once the wearer
of the Koh-i-nur and occupant of the Peacock
Throne, who concealed the great diamond in his
turban and then was courteously invited to change
turbans by Nadir Shah. If ever death had beautiful
and artistic recompense, "it is here, it is here, it is
here," surely. Remembering the monstrosities of
monuments and mausoleums in our Western grave-
yards, the broken columns, cremation urns, and mis-
applied Greek vase shapes that make our cemeteries
places of horror, one wishes that committees on
American public monuments and memorials might
study these Indian tombs. Akbar's brother has also
a marble sarcophagus carved in finest lacework, that
rests under a great open pavilion, a marble canopy
supported by sixty-four carved columns. While we
stood enthusiastic by this exquisite tomb, comparing
it with the domed sentry-box by the Hudson where
lies America's greatest soldier, a piercing wail arose.
A lone turban on a near roof was waving a yak-tail
in air as the voice wailed so dismally. Soon black
specks in the furthest sky defined themselves as hur-
rying bird-shapes, hovered like gigantic butterflies
directly between us and the zenith sun, and whirled
in prismatic beauty to our feet, a homing flock of
pigeons. Like foot-soldiers, these winged creatures
obeyed the voice and signals of their keeper, went
through their evolutions, and caught the grain
thrown in air. Afterward we recognized the pigeon-

DETAIL OF KUTAB illXAR.

OLD DELHI 233

keeper's frequent cry from Delhi roofs, and watched
obedient flocks circle and wheel at the will of in-
visible owners.

After five miles of temples, tombs, and graves we
had had our fill of mortuary constructions, and, to
the consternation of the bearer, refused to descend
for Safdar Jang's tomb. "What, memsahib! Not
see Safdar Jang? Everybody must see. Very nice
tomb. Three-story place, that tomb. Gentries al-
ways go see that tomb." But we were obdurate.
Safdar Jang was only the unlucky vizier of an in-
conspicuous Somebody Shah, and Fergusson had
said that the mausoleum would "not bear close in-
spection."

All this time we were conscious of a slender, dark
lance lifted against the sky-line. It was what we
had come so far to see— the Kutab minar, one of the
seven great sights of India, and certainly the most
beautiful tower in the world. It grew as we ad-
vanced, until each angle, balcony, and band of let-
tering on its three red sandstone sections declared
itself, and the flat, white marble sections at the sum-
mit were merged in inconspicuous perspective. This
remarkable Kutab is emphatically such a departure
from all the round or square towers ever seen that
one has no wish to consider how it might have looked
if constructed of one material throughout, or if the
bands of ornament, the balconies, and the honey-
comb work had been omitted. It is so richly deco-
rated, it is itself so decorative, that at moments it
seems as if it were only the fancy of a season, a mere
World's Fair fantasy in staff or stucco, instead of a

234 WINTER INDIA

solidly built tower that has stood there for a thou-
sand years, enduring earthquakes and sieges, and
restorations by the later Moguls. One has to mount
the roof of the mosque and see the great shaft at the
level of its lowest bands of ornament to realize its
size and the beauty and sharpness of those bold let-
ters. One willingly traverses rubbish-heaps to do
homage to the builder, Kutab-uddin, the Pathan
ruler, who rose from slavery to the throne, and who,
before the completion of his Tower of Victory, was
laid away. One feels a personal loss and depriva-
tion, too, that Ala-uddin, two centuries later, did
not finish his great minaret, which would have re-
peated the Kutab on larger lines, and mounted five
hundred feet in air,— twice the height of the Kutab,
— the entire surface faced with carved stones. View-
ing the Kutab at close range and from afar, one re-
members pityingly the campaniles and giraldas, obe-
lisks, spires, and pinnacles of the West. They used
to do this thing so much better in India.

The Kutab is so entirely the thing at Old Delhi,
that one lags in enthusiasm over the mosque, with
its ruined arches and its hundred carved columns,
spoil of Buddhist and Jain temples that the Pathans
destroyed. To-day interest in the mosque court cen-
ters in the wrought-iron column, whose Sanskrit
inscription dates back to the first century of our era.
Native tourists flock to it as the great sight, and
believe that if one reaches around the column back-
ward and touches his hands together, good luck will
follow him. The tomb of Altamsh, who built the
mosque, and the one remaining gate of the court

OLD DELHI 235

declare the scale of ornamentation that once covered
all these crumbled walls and arches. Every inch of
the roofless tomb is covered with carved ornament,—
inscriptions, traceries, arabesques, and geometrical
designs — the most ornamented mausoleum in India.

In the chilly, whitewashed vaults of the rest-
house in the shadow of the Kutab, with dusty
chicks to exclude any pernicious sunshine, we shiv-
ered over the cold, cold tifSn we had brought with us.
Not hot bouillion nor hot chocolate could mitigate
the death chill of that interior, or our interiors, and
we hastened to drive with the wind four miles to the
tomb of Tughlak. That massive, fortress-like place,
of characteristic Egyptian solidity, was in extreme
contrast to the highly ornamented tombs we had
been seeing all day. The sloping walls and the en-
tire absence of ornament came as a surprise, but the
Pathan emperor has the ideal warrior's tomb. A
crumbling wall half screens the ruins of his de-
serted capital of Tughlakabad, within which Tugh-
lak's fortress is as Egyptian as his suburban tomb.

Some street-dancers pleaded with us at the hotel
door, followed around and tapped on our windows,
and we relented and moved the tea-table to the ter-
race, where it was really warmer than in the house.
The two women, in cheap cottons and cheap jew-
elry, posed and whirled to a monotonous measure
beaten on a skin drum. One woman gracefully car-
ried a tiny child on her hip, or set it down on the
cold flags, where it played contentedly with its fin-
gers. Both dancers wore voluminous accordion-
plaited skirts of red cotton, with yellow head-sheets

13

236 WINTEE INDIA

patterned in red, and they were covered, as with
breastplates, by many silver-coin necklaces. One
dancer was a tall, sinuous creature, with a mark-
edly Jewish or Egyptian face, who did the serpen-
tine dance of Cairo cafes, and bent backward to pick
up a rupee from the ground with her eyelids.
Every step was marked by the jingle and clash of
her bracelets and anklets, and this serpent of old
Jumna, after one lively measure, paused and spread
out her crinkled draperies in great butterfly-wings
behind her in a "Loie Fuller pose" as old as Delhi.
We had lamps and more lamps brought, eyes and
turbans uncounted gathered in the dusk, and, in-
spired by native approval and tourist rupees, the
skirt dance went on through many figures.

We sent runners to find them the next morn-
ing. We wanted them to dance at noon, that we
might turn a battery of kodaks upon them. "Those
are very poor, common dancers," said the bearer,
scornfully. ''I will get very splendid nautches, in
silk and kincob saris and very splendid jewels, in
'niklasses' and 'griddles' of rubies and pearls."
But we wanted only those same dancers in their
cheap clothes and silver necklaces and girdles; and
it took insistence to get them. They came; and in
the sunlight their silver and glass, brass and lac jew-
elry were as gems, and our enthusiasm was greater
than that of the night before. They danced their
best, held their poses interminably for the time ex-
posures, and we reeled film away so recklessly that
the hotel manager said: "Oh, madam, if you have
so many plates to spare, won't you take my baby?"

STREET DAXCEES. DELHI.

CHAPTER XVIII

LAHORE

VEN the Delhi bullocks were blanketed
the day we left for Lahore and the
farther, colder Northwest. We had
bought more and more razais as we
went up-country, until the bichauna,
or rolls of traveling bedding, would barely pass
through a car door, and, finally, yards of heavy pash-
mina cloth to wind around us in makeshift Indian
fashion. The memorial Mutiny cross, standing high
on the Ridge, was the last seen of Delhi; and there
followed a few wayside stations with sliivering plat-
form groups, an uninteresting sunset over a dusty,
barren plain; dinner at Saharanpur, and merciful
darkness, while we jolted on until five o'clock in the
morning.

It was dark night when we were whirled through
Lahore's frosty streets, to find warm rooms with
real coal fires in open grates. We reappeared with the
latest British breakf asters at the long table d'hote,
and in the city of his youth we found a whole table
full of Kipling characters— English army people
and civil servants. We could almost call them all
by name, and life at that hotel was a continuous

239

240 WINTER INDIA

dramatization of stories known by heart. What a
company they were ! And how they denied their
maker, or portrait-painter, when we said Kipling to
them! There was the major's wife, fat, brune, and
long past forty, wrinkles drawn in lines of pearl
powder around her eyes and under her chin. She
wore a youthful sailor-hat, a frizzed front, and a
Bath bun, and had all the kittenish w^ays of sweet
sixteen. Her most devoted cavalier, in a cloud of
attentive subalterns, was a callow blond, young
enough to be her grandson ; and if there had been no
one else in the hotel, we should have had entertain-
ment enough in the kitten-play of this elderly
charmer. When not making eyes and simpering at
her courtiers, she queened it over the "lef tenants' "
and captains' wives, and was inclined to snub a
commissioner's daughter. She looked us over criti-
cally through a lorgnette, just as we had stared at
the tigers and chetahs at the Zoo, and put to us
those direct British questions that the rural Yankee
cannot match. Having disclosed our relationships,
our nationality, our past and future itinerary, and
explained the other tourists as far as we knew"
them, we reversed the situation in Li Hung Chang
fashion, and interviewed the interviewer. It always
touches the sensitive nerve and presses the button of
Anglo-Indian loquacity to mention Kipling, and
away went the major's lady like a steeplechaser
when we said that Lahore only meant Kipling to
us. "No one in India reads Kipling," she said im-
pressively. "We do not esteem him at all. He does
not tell the truth about anything. Why, he was a

LAHORE 241

very common, low sort of person here. He only
associated with the 'Tommies,' as you see by his
books— all full of things about the serf^eants' and
the soldiers' wives and their class. Of course, as he
never associated witli ladies, or went with the nice
chaps of the regiments, how could he know anything
about society, about Government House, or the
Simla sets? Why, in that ridiculous story—" and
she told me in detail how he had it all wrong about
the Gadsbj^s, the Hauksbees, and others ; for she knew
some people who were in Simla that year, and it was
this way, etc., etc. In fact, all those ancient and
historic scandals were degrees worse than Kipling
makes them out; for the Anglo-Indians allow no
imagination to the novelist, every tale must be iden-
tified with some real event in their own experience.
As to whether Kipling truly delineated native char-
acter— ''Dear me, how should I know anything
about the nasty creatures ! As if we paid any at-
tention to them ! Government has schools and does
altogether too much for them, anyhow." And then
the memsahib, who of course did not speak Hindu-
stani, who never came in contact with native women
of any but the servant class, and who fitted exactly
into the situation that Mrs. Steele upbraids, de-
nounced that champion of the native people. It was
quite like the Creoles of New Orleans and Mr. Cable ;
but having heard Macaulay berated, Max Miiller
scoffed at, and Sir AVilliam Hunter denounced, it
was taken with many grains of salt.

More interesting than anything inside the La-
hore Museum is the fine old bronze cannon before its

242 WINTER INDIA

door — the Sikhs cherished Zamzamah, a national
trophy glorified to them by history and legend, and
immortalized to all English-speaking people as the
gun bestrode by Kim the Rishti, when the Lama
first appeared to him. The rich collections in the
"wonder-house" were assembled and arranged by
the elder Kipling, the white-bearded curator whom
the Lama met there. Its unique treasures are the
Greco-Buddhist sculptures which General Cunning-
ham found on the site of the ancient Gandhara
(modem Peshawar), capital of the Scythian empire
when Buddhism was the state religion— majestic
statues of Gautama as priest and prince, and bas-
reliefs as exquisite as the Alexander sarcophagus.
The arts of later India are well shown, and fine old
carved and inlaid doors, panels, balconies, window
latticings, and house-fronts serve as models for the
students of the art school which J. L. Kipling
founded and directed to such successful degree be-
fore he left India. Copies of these old carvings are
sold at prices that torment the American, who, after
paying their cost and transportation, nearly must
pay for them over again at his home custom-house,
in order to protect steam furniture-factories. Sil-
ver, brass- and copper-work, lacquers, potteries, tex-
tiles, and embroideries from the Panjab are gathered
there, and the model of the Koh-i-nur has pathetic
interest in Lahore, its last home. In January the
stone walls and stone floors of the museum create
an ice-edged atmosphere more benumbing than the
death-dealing chill of the Lateran galleries in Rome,
and one soon flees from it.

LAHORE 243

The tomb of Anarkali, given first place in the
guide-book, and warranted the most interesting thing
in Lahore, drew us to the domed white building, in
turn occupied as the English civilian church and as
local offices. Anarkali, pretty "Pomegranate Blos-
som," was one of Akbar's wives, and, being seen
to smile when Akbar's son, Jahangir, entered the
harem, was buried alive. Akbar held the trial after
the execution, and must have had a very bad con-
science, judging from the beauty of the little mau-
soleum and the white marble sarcophagus, covered
every inch with the finest ornament and lettering
in relief. It is a thing to be kept under glass and
shown as the chief treasure of a museum ; but Brit-
ish officialdom has shoved it aside, out from under
the center of its dome, to an alcove where we pur-
sued it around desks and braziers and wooden chairs,
a babu in woolen neck-comforter obligingly lifting
a heap of papers that we might see all the sculptured
surface. Throughout Lahore splendid Moslem
tombs were turned to practical use after British
occupation. Even Government House was adapted
from the tomb of Akbar's cousin, with additions to
meet later requirements. When such desecration be-
gan, the angry Mohammedans foretold death within
a year to all such vandals, and when any prophet's
reputation was at stake he took care that poison, as
a last resort, should verify his forecast. The Bengali
babus perched on high stools around the mauso-
leum were amused at our indignant comments. No-
thing could please them more than any affronts to
Mohammedan prejudices or sensibilities, and the

244 WINTER INDIA

hatred between the men of the two religions is
something one slowly realizes. The Mohammedan
despises the Hindu and his sacred cow, and loves to
kill and eat the peacock, while, in return, the Hindu
delights in defiling Mohammedan precincts with the
loathed dog and pig; and in Lahore the Sikhs are
against both religions and have long scores to settle.
In "On the City Walls," Kipling shows the tur-
moil accompanying any religious festival. The Mo-
hammedan deeply hates the babu, but until the re-
cent establishment of the Aligarh College had made
no effort to put forward Mohammedan youth as rival
to the glib Bengali in preparing for public service.
The street crowds of Lahore were more pictur-
esque even than those of Delhi. A different type of
man had appeared overnight, or rather the occa-
sional whiskered giants seen on the Chandni Chauk
were here universal — more beard, more turban,
yards and yards more cloth in the baggy trousers
and shoulder shawls. The long coats of the Persians,
the flaring, crossed Chinese coat of Turkestan and
Tibet appeared, and there were stray Afghans, too,
picturesque and ferocious giants, wearing peaked tur-
bans, sheepskin coats, and striped shoulder shawls.
When we had left the orderly civil lines and had
gone through the city gates, we entered the land
of the Arabian Nights, more of color, incident, and
picturesqueness to be seen in the bazaars of Lahore
than anywhere else in India. Queer, ramshackle
houses towered along the narrow streets, some fres-
coed in colors, their fronts broken by balconies, log-
gias, bay-windows, and latticings of dark, carved

LAHORE 247

wood, with flat roofs and parapets at every elevation
—roofs that Kim ran over, roofs where the women
gasped in ''The City of Dreadful Night"; for, al-
though Lahore is so far north, it is one of the hottest
places in summer,— Meean Mir cantonment the ac-
knowledged **oven of India," where epidemics al-
ways rage their worst.

All Lahore was muffled and bundled in cotton
clothes and brilliant chuddas, and all sought the
sun that crisp, frosty morning, until the streets held
a living, moving rainbow mass and every shop-front
seemed set for color effect. Women in gay head-
sheets and children in satin jackets sunned them-
selves in window-frames of dark-brown fretted wood-
work; and Mohammedan women in white cloaks
falling full from round crown-pieces, with latticed
holes for the eyes, wandered in the brilliant company,
giving it still more the air of a fancy-dress ball. The
carnival crowds, moving against such fantastic back-
ground, made one listen for slow music to accom-
pany this stately spectacular march. It seemed as
though the Lahore bazaars were but painted wings,
drops, and flies, the crowds one well-drilled theatri-
cal troupe— a continuous performance kept up for
our benefit. All the industries were picturesque,
every shop decorative, and we stood fascinated,
to watch the baker reaching down into the deep mud
oven with a hooked wire and bringing out pancake
loaves of bread ; the dyer stirring his vats, wring-
ing out lengths of cloth and festooning them over
the front of his shop ; the printer, next door, stamp-
ing block patterns on turban ends, and the Kash-

248 WINTER INDIA

miri men and boys, cross-legged in alcoves, em-
broidering gold turban ends or fine shaAvl borders.
One Kashmiri in purple satin jacket and a yellow
turban worked with gold wire, while a small boy
in a sleeveless red jacket and a woman in a head-
sheet of vivid pink looked on. Heaps of oranges
and pale bananas, red Kashmiri apples, and green
Kabul grapes made set color studies on every fruit-
stand. The dried-sweetmeat shops were as rich in
combinations of browns and tawny orange, and the
curry-shops were as satisfying with their strands
of red peppers and baskets of red, white, yellow,
brown, and greenish meal. Candy-sellers crouched
in the open with trays of sticky sweets, beseeching
us to keep our shadows away. Having thus defiled a
tray of gujack, we bought it and found many idlers
willing to eat the defiled sesame brittle, made of
sesame seeds, sorghum syrup, seedless raisins, al-
mond meal, and crescents of thin cocoanut strips,
the rich "fudge" rolled out in a thin pancake over
a foot in diameter. Silk-shops, brass- and pottery-
shops, gem-cutters' and shoemakers' dens, were all
decorative and interesting. The tea-shops, with
steaming samovars, were significant of the dreaded
Russian advance and influence. The red beans of
New England and pop-corn had a familiar look even
in such strange environment.

After a revel in this living picturesqueness we
went ruefully back to conventional sight-seeing and
did the Jama Masjid, with its superb inlaid arches,
and saw the relics of the Prophet. We saw Run-
jeet Singh's tomb, its carved doors and gay mirror

LAHORE 249

and plaster interior, where Sikh priests shouted
from the sacred books, waved peacock feathers, and
threw jasmine garlands over us. We saw also Ak-
bar's fort and palace— tawdry and flat after the
splendors of Delhi ; our fancy arrested by the inlaid
hall known as the Naulahka, name also of a quar-
ter of the outer city of Lahore. When the Sikhs
captured Lahore they wreaked themselves on these
halls of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, and the British
barrack-builder has done the rest. The Scotch cor-
poral who showed us through dwelt mostly on some
finely damascened and grained guns, chain-mail,
swords, and Sikh knives in the armory. In one
pavilion the fantastic mirror and plaster walls were
crying aloud at some hideous European carpets and
furnitui'e— the rankest of "Tottenham Court Road
furniture." Small wonder that the Viceroy exhorted
the Indian princes to patronize their own craftsmen
when it came to palace furnishings. This pavilion
commands a fine view out over the parapet of the
city wall to the park below, with the blue windings
of the Ravi beyond distant trees; but the best-re-
membered palace sight was a Sikh sergeant's wife,
who was a walking jewel-show, covered from crown
to ringed toe with such an array of ornaments as
one might expect an emperor's favorite to wear. We
expressed our thanks for the pleasure of seeing her,
to the amusement of the Scot and the pride of the
Sikh proprietor of the jeweled jade.

After a hasty tiffin with the Kipling crowd, who
were full bent on the regimental tea and polo-match
of the afternoon, we took a hastier look at the un-

250 WINTER INDIA

usual animals of the ''lion and tiger museum,"
where the most remarkable sight was a monkey hold-
ing a looking-glass that it might see to pick its
teeth and prick its throat with a dangerous-looking
darning-needle. We hastened back to the native
city, and from the time we left the "Europe shops"
and the avenue of trees with shabby tram-cars jin-
gling by and penetrated the city gate, we moved
in an ideal East, an Arabian Nights' revel of Mo-
hammedan picturesqueness. The half-mile bazaar
between Vazir Khan's and the Golden Mosque is
the heart of Lahore, all the people and trades of
the Panjab being exhibited there. In that narrow
lane between the balconied houses, where every win-
dow flaunted some flaming turban or shawl, and
each alcove shop was set for theatrical effect and
overflowed to the street, there moved the same bril-
liantly costumed company of the morning. All pic-
turesqueness and color centered in greatest intensity
at the gateway of the Vazir Kllian Mosque, single
figures and groups in tableaux tempting the kodak,
until we feared we should have no more film left
after Lahore. Before that glorious portal, its fa-
cade a dream of soft old Persian tiles, there con-
gregated barbers, beggars, peddlers, money-chang-
ers, letter-writers, and smithies, prostrate bullocks,
venders of fat-tailed sheep, donkeys loaded with
vegetables, hawkers, idlers, and busy people of every
kind. "Remove thy heart from the gardens of the
world, and know that this building is the true abode
of man," is written in slender letters on the blue
and green Persian tiles of the mosque front; and

SCriOOL-BUVS IX THK VA/.li; KUAN MoscilK. l,Aniil;i;,

AKilIlAN l-ALcnNKK. I'KSIl A \V A I;

LAHORE 253

a legion of beggars have taken the Vazir at his
word, lounging on the steps and in sunny corners
all day, and sleeping at night in the quiet court over-
looked by two minarets. Professional menders sit
patching rags as though waiting for kodaks to come
that way, and a balcony off the cloister overlooks the
busy street, exactly as an opera-box commands less
spectacular effects.

There was a sound like the chirp of many birds,
and a school-teacher led three hundred small boys
into the court. Each youngster put his books, coat,
shoes, and turban-cloth in a heap, and knelt by the
tank to bathe hands and feet before prayer. The
teacher patrolled the lines with a stick, trouncing
a laggard here and thrashing a boy there into the
line and order of piety. When the unruly and rest-
less flock were purified, a leader among them gave a
call, and all filed in under the arches and prostrated
themselves on the inlaid floor, facing westward to
Mecca. One small turban explained to us that they
came there every day to "pray to God," and the
pious scamp showed me on the last leaf of his school-
book : " In the name of God, the Most Merciful, this
is my book. The property of Hassan Khan. Do
not steal."

When we had seen the three gilded bubble domes
of the Golden Mosque reflected in the tank of its
white court, and the Hindus going through their
purification rites at the temple by the bo-tree, the
bearer was for carrying us back through the Delhi
Gate to the silver-shops and Europe shops and the
shops for Kashmir work and Bokhara silks, to

254 WINTER INDIA

hunt for green slippers with seed-pearl toes, for
Peshawar shoes woven of strips of leather on models
used by Alexander the Great's shoemaker— to hunt
for Yarkand jade and Ladak turquoises, but our
interest in such shops was gone. "Drive back," we
said; and, repassing the mosque, we threaded again
all those brilliant bazaars, were blocked in a narrow
lane by a funeral, and came out finally on a common
by the fort, where men and boys were flying kites.
A crowd was jeering and cheering the fliers, and
one bearded parent soundly boxed his son's ears
when he bungled in launching his paper shield.
"Drive back," and we worked slowly again to the
Delhi Gate, where the crowds had even increased.
Once more we threaded the brilliant labyrinth and
saw the kite-fliers reel in their chargers. A spec-
tacular sunset fired the sky, and when for the fifth
time we traversed the narrow lanes, they were lanes
of twinkling enchantment, every window and alcove
carrying its kerosene-lamp and torches flaring by
the Vazir Khan. The frosty air was laden with the
bazaar's mixed smell of raw sugar, incense, spices,
grease, and wood smoke, and only a dinner-company
of Kipling's own could have drawn us away.

It was almost a surprise the next morning to find
the streets, the shops, the crowds, the tiled front
of the mosque all there, to find Lahore bazaars solid
realities, and not dreams. We saw Shalimar Gar-
dens, the triple-terraced home of the nightingale,
once an imperial pleasure-ground, arranged like one
seen in dreams, but now a rather dusty, dreary place
of formal flower-beds, fountains, marble cascades,

LAHORE 255

and canals, that becomes a palace garden of enchant-
ment when illuminated for viceregal functions. More
interesting was the drive to the Ravi and across
a bridge of boats, where the passage of bullock-carts
and trains of donkeys was regulated by the bridge-
keeper's drum-beats. We found Jahangir's tomb
deep down in a square marble terrace in another
formal garden, where orange-trees hung full of fruit
and flower-beds were masses of bloom. This son of
Akbar, the reputed Christian, who at least wore a
rosary and was so bad a Moslem that he drank to
inebriety, spent his summers in the Vale of Kashmir
with his clever Persian wife, Nur Jahan,— Nur Ma-
hal, the Harem's Pride, told of in ''Lalla Rookh,"and
who seems a very real personage. He is laid away
in an octagonal chamber deep down in a solid square
terrace, in such a cenotaph as rivals that of Anar-
kali. Instead of white relief carving, Jahangir's
sarcophagus is inlaid, quite the most beautiful piece
of pietra dura that I had seen. Flowers and ara-
besques are inlaid with large pieces of amethyst,
lapis, jade, and carnelian, and the ninety-nine
names of Allah in fine black marble letters sur-
round the sarcophagus. Runjeet Singh despoiled the
tomb of its upper pavilions and marble pavement,
but the British have repaved and restored the ter-
race—and viceregal tea-tables are now spread di-
rectly over the body of Jahangir, and all is as gay
as when he made it a feast-place before his death.

CHAPTER XIX

THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE

j|T was a damp and dreary, a raw and
chilly afternoon when we drove away
from Kipling's people and waited for
an hour in that drafty, echoing for-
tress— the Lahore railway station.
The Northern Railway across the Pan jab, being a
government line, is subject to delays and alterations
of schedule to suit special needs, and the red car-
pets at hand for the arrival of the "L. G. " of the
Panjab on the following afternoon promised greater
delays had we deferred our start. As all first-class
cars are run at a loss on Indian railways, we could
not complain at the usual forlorn conveyance; but
the rattling window-panes of blue or violet glass,
admitting the chill, actinic light, made the shabby
car drearier and dingier than usual, and seemed to
add degrees of cold to the air. The bleak and stony
yellow plain, like the sage-brush and alkali wastes
of Nevada, looked snow-covered through these tinted
glasses, and the cold, blue, depressing light finally
suggested the experiments made with invalids, luna-
tics, and plants at the time of the blue-glass craze

256

THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE 257

and cure of so long ago. It was impossible to read
in the jolting carriage, and we could only draw rugs
and razais aBout us and watch the drear landscape
roll by as the trucks thundered over the dusty road-
bed. The groups on station platforms grew more
pinched and more uncomfortable-looking, with cot-
ton clothes more and more voluminous in cut, and
streaming with more and more loose ends of extra
drapery, as we ran on through the frosty, hazy glow
of a sudden yellow sunset that, glorifying the white
peaks of Kashmir, faded quickly to a green and a
hyacinthine sky, and then to the blackness of winter
night.

The one weary lamp in the carriage did not give
light enough for us to read and lay to heart the
several framed ordinances which the government
railway holds up to travelers. Evidently there is
a ''dog question" in British India equal to the
"cow question" in the Hindu and Mohammedan
circles. "His Excellency the Governor-General in
Council" had first to rule:

DOGS IN CARRIAGES

Passengers will not be allowed to take any dog into a pas-
senger carriage, except with the permission of the Station Master
at the starting station, and also with the consent of their fellow
passengers, and then only on payment of a double fare for each
dog, subject to the condition that it shall be removed if subse-
quently objected to, no refund being given. This rule does not
apply to dogs conveyed in reserved compartments, or carriages,
or in private special trains. The number of dogs to be taken
into a reserved compartment must not exceed three.

14

258 WINTEE INDIA

And again it was intimated to the public in the
formal phrase of a viceregal ball- or dinner-card,
by a secretary, who said :

I am directed to state that His Excellency the Governor-
General in Coiincil considers it desirable in the interest of the
travelling public to rule that in future no person shall be allowed
to take any dog into a passenger carriage, except with the con-
sent of the Station Master at starting station and also with the
concurrence of the fellow passengers.

At sunrise the next morning we saw the blue
range of the Hindu Kush with a sprinkling of snow
on its sharp crest-lines, and the same dreary, dry,
stony plain around us, broken only by a few clay
bluffs and the gullied watercourses of the rainy sea-
son. The air was thin, sharp, and frosty as we low-
ered the rattling blue window-panes for a look at the
forlorn adobe village on the banks, and the great
fortified bridge across the Indus at Attock — Attock !
the ford and crossing-place of every invader and
conqueror from the North since Aryan times ; where
every one of them camped and fought,— Egyptian,
Persian, Greek, Scythian, Afghan, and Mogul, down
to Nadir Shah. When the train had trailed slowly
across the high iron girders and passed through an-
other great fortress bridge-tower, it turned sharply
and ran along the bank, giving us a view of the
great picturesque front of Akbar's fort on the oppo-
site bluff. Except for that imposing battlemented
castle and fortified bridge, the muddy river, the
banks, the stony plain, and the blue mountain-range
showing so clearly in the thin, dry air, might as well

THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE 259

have been the country of the upper Missouri; but
this plain between the Indus and the Safed Koh has
been a world 's battle-ground for more than two thou-
sand years, and history is written on top of history
like records on a palimpsest. Here at the Indus
has always been the virtual frontier of India, the
river drawing a natural line from the Himalayas
down to the Persian Gulf; but, once advancing
here to a valley and there to a range, the frontier
has crept westward and northward, and is still ever-
moving, changing, and elusive.

At Khairabad station, facing Attoek, the early
morning tea-table was ready on the platform, and
muffled figures bore trays of steaming cups to the
car windows, while benumbed travelers surrounded
the tall samovar. The wildest lot of turbaned and
disheveled folk, some in sheepskin coats and some
wound over and looped up with unmanageable yards
and yards of loose cotton clothing and loaded down
with strange saddle-bags, bundles, water-jars, and
hubble-bubble pipes, were already waiting when the
train drew up. When the third-class passengers,
who had been packed to standing-room all night,
were bundled out and added to this waiting crowd
while a fresh train w'as made up, there was spec-
tacle indeed, local color too, and such an uproar as
threatened the demolition of the Indian Empire—
or at least the sacking of the train and the raz-
ing of Khairabad station. The whole traveling pub-
lic had changed overnight to the fierce Afghan type,
which had been so picturesque when first seen in the
bazaars of Lahore; and the vehement giants, tur-

260 WINTER INDIA

baned and bearded to exaggeration, ramped up and
down the platform with bare feet thrust in loose,
clattering Mohammedan shoes, shouldering and hus-
tling one another in no gentle way. Despite the
clamor and the crowding, as so many desperate
tribesmen stormed and carried each third-class car-
riage and filled every cubic inch of its space with
their own superfluous size and belongings, the train
finally drew away, leaving the platform full of left-
over passengers— '4iuge, black-haired, scowling sons
of Ben-i- Israel," who raged aloud in their wrath,
until one felt sure the station-master must barri-
fiade himself and the great guns of Attock thunder
across the river before the uproar would subside.
These tall, hairy, and noisy creatures, with peaked
Afghan caps within their striped turban-cloths, were
far removed from the soft and supple Hindus we
had left in the South, unlike even the bearded Sikhs
at Lahore. We had journeyed overnight to another
country, had come again to a blue-eyed people, to
the pale Aryans of the Northwest, to a race of wea-
ther-beaten and ruddy-cheeked mountaineers, to the
Pathans of Kipling's tales— tales so true, pictures
so clearly painted, that one recognizes these hairy
giants as fascinating old acquaintances, characters
in fiction come to life.

Crossing more of the same dreary, yellow plain,
and nearing the mountain barrier, the train at last
ran by the mud walls of a mud city in a mud plain,
—Peshawar, Akbar's ''frontier city," the extreme
northern outpost of the Indian Empire; nineteen
hundred miles from Cape Comorin and two hun-

THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE 261

dred and seventy-eight miles from Lahore— the lat-
ter distance covered by fast-mail train in seventeen
hours. The storied mud walls of the city were like
adobe pueblos, and the same dry and treeless plain,
dry, thin atmosphere, and glaring white sunlight of
the American Southwest blinded us as we drove from
the end of the track at the cantonment station to the
drooping roses and poinsettias in the dusty gardens
of the dak bangla.

By previous correspondence with the commis-
sioner at Peshawar— and here let me bear testimony
to the unfailing courtesy, the endless kindness, the
considerate interest which every English official in
India accords to the winter wanderers — through the
kindness of this unknown northern commissioner
we had been fully informed of the preparations
necessary for a visit to the Khyber, and by dint
of many telegrams everything was in train for our
arrival. The khansamah at the bangla served his tiffin
on the moment, and soon the babu of the political
agent was there with the permits to travel the Khyber
Pass as far as Ali Masjid on the following caravan
day, and with an order for the detail of sowars of
Khyber Rifles to act as escort. Straightway we
judged horses and made bargains with splendidly
whiskered old Hassan Khan at his hospital of
broken vehicles in the bazaar, and quoted to him
the while the commissioner's warning that the only
danger in the Khyber Pass would be from the
chance of an unbroken pony being put in harness.
The turbaned one, with his hand on his heart, as-
sured us that we should have the most safe and

262 WINTER INDIA

stately barouche and pair to convey us to Jamrud,
at the entrance of the pass, at sunrise, and that he
would speed us on thence toward Afghanistan and
the elusive, illusive, ever-moving frontier in light
dog-carts of the variety known to the natives as the
"tum-tum" (tandem). All this for sixteen ru-
pees, ''and what your ladyship may please."

As "that narrow sword-cut in the hills" was open
and guarded only on Tuesdays and Fridays, the
two caravan days of each week, there was stir in
Peshawar city and cantonment that day. Long
caravan trains of camels and donkeys were then
filing out and across the dusty plain to pass the
night in the fortified serai below Jamrud fort,
ready for a sunrise start through the defile to Lundi
Khana at the Afghan end, where no white traveler
goes, save by very special arrangement with civil
and military authorities.

Peshawar, once an Afghan city in fact, still bears
all its Persian and Central Asian characteristics;
and this flat-roofed city within its great mud walls
is also a metropolis, a little Paris for all Central
Asia, whither flock Afghans and turbaned folk from
over the border to shop and spend their money, to
luxuriate and dissipate in all the ways of Orient
and Occident there combined, and to hatch fresh
conspiracies against Pax Britannica, One must
read his Kipling to enjoy Peshawar, and must see
Peshawar and its people fully to enjoy Kipling.
All through " The Man Who Would be King,"
"The Drums of the Fore and Aft," "The Man Who
Was," "The Lost Regiment," and "Wee Willie

THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE 263

Winkie, ' ' and in the " Ballad of the King 's Jest, ' ' are
pictures and glimpses of Peshawar, the Pathans and
the hills, that flash upon one's memory at every turn.
With Peshawar, too, are associated all the great
names of Anglo-Indian history of the past half-cen-
tury,—Lawrence, Edwards, Nicholson, and both the
Robertses.

The great cantonment at the end of the track
is one of the chief military stations of the empire,
and while it rejoices in a crisp, electric air worthy
of a sanatorium in midwinter, its climate for the
rest of the year gives it an evil name. It is another of
the many "ovens of India," where the thermometer
rises to 102° and 110° every summer, and where the
gray, beclouded, breathless dog-days during the
rains aggravate men to madness.

After all the other bazaars of India, after the
Chandni Chauk of Delhi and the brilliant, theatri-
cal, spectacular streets of Lahore, the bazaars of
Peshawar were captivating out of all reason, and
held us fascinated until dusk, when lamps and
lanterns threw strange illumination upon all the
picturesque people known to the Middle East. There
was not so much color as at Lahore, perhaps; but
the fiercely bearded ones, with their tremendous tur-
l)ans, long chogas, or caftans, and gay vests, were
so many hundreds of Vereshchagin's models turned
loose, and kodak film was reeled away by the yard
as long as the spool would turn. It was too strik-
ing, too theatrical, and too spectacular to be the
every-day life at even the farthest end of the em-
pire. Each little open alcove of a shop along the

264 WINTER INDIA

broad street leading in from the Edwards Gate in
the city wall held its tableau, its Vereshchagin
group already posed, every man of them six feet
tall, fierce and stalwart. These "Pathan devils,"
''these Kabul-ly men," as our bearer called them,
were as truculent, turbulent, and untamed a lot as
one could wish to see, and our bearer fairly quaked
when one of these swashbucklers brushed against
him, or a hook-nosed, wolfish red-beard scowled
at him and contemptuously discussed him with a
brother of Kabul. The Jewish cast of features was
unmistakable, and the turbans and garments were
identical with those worn by Moses and the prophets
—a biblical picture, truly. These hulking giants
who strode about like conquerors, these picturesque
cutthroats and splendid fighting animals, are sup-
posed to be harmless, from having been relieved
of their arms and weapons when they entered
British territory, but no doubt every one of them
had a yard-long, triangular Afghan knife concealed
within his baggy garments. All wore peaked caps
within the turban-cloth and some heavy, striped
blankets thrown theatrically over one shoulder, but
the crocheted Afghan of fancy-work fairs was no-
where to be seen— another disillusionment of travel.
An unkempt old falconer with hooded bird on wrist,
and just such a Scythian sort of barbarian next
him as sculptors show in the train of Alexander the
Great, were a pair that willingly posed for their
portraits.

There was such richness, such conglomeration and
embarrassment of picturesqueness on every hand,

THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE 265

that one needed the all-compassing eyes of a fly to
see it. Persia's nearness was attested by the grace-
ful shapes of water-pots, bottles and bowls, the dam-
ascened metals and the blue-glazed pottery; and
the Russian advance was there in visible, tangible
form in the tall copper samovars that steamed and
hissed in the frequent tea-shops— the hand of Russia
seen in every such gathering-place, and the seeds of
sedition lying in every bowl of tea.

Disputing passage with a deliberate ox loaded
with twice its bulk of fodder-cane, we came through
a deep arch in a wall to the circular Bokhara, or silk
bazaar, and to a dazzling picture all light and life
and color in the blazing, blinding sunlight of that
early, cloudless afternoon. Dens of alcove shops
surrounded the great open space, where leafless trees
cast thin traceries of shadows over the bare earth,
and scores of men sat in groups in the sun, twirling
reels of green, yellow, rose, and purple silks, toss-
ing glistening skeins of every hue as they came
fresh from traders' packs or dyers' vats. Bales of
woven silks and shimmering lengths of gay tissues
were heaped and spread over the floors of the tiny
shops ; and sitting statuesque, or moving in and out
among the whirling spindles, were Afghan and Bo-
khara silk merchants and brokers, who brightened
the scene with their gold-threaded and -fringed tur-
ban-cloths, gold-embroidered and cloth-of-gold vests
and waistcoats, and inner garments of gorgeous Bo-
khara shadow-silks. From "silken Samarkand,"
from Bokhara and Kabul, these men come every win-
ter to this silk bazaar, and huge bales of raw silks

266 WINTER INDIA

and woven stuffs were being unloaded that after-
noon from groaning camels that had trod softly-
down from the Khanates to kneel in the Peshawar
oval— to be reloaded with Manchester piece-goods
and tread slowly back again before hot weather.

There were picturesque money-changers, too, in
this bazaar — bearded and turbaned old Persians,
wrapped in long and richly furred garments, sit-
ting somnolent and prosperous in the sunshine, with
loose heaps of coins from all the border countries
before them. One even wondered if the rupees and
annas, the unknown coins with crescents and Per-
sian texts, and the yet more insidious rubles and
copecks were real, — if they were not stage accessories
and part of the tableaux rather than the visible
capital and assets of genuine Shylocks.

Color was rampant in the shoe bazaar, the long
line of cobblers' lairs strewn and strung over with
peaked slippers and great strips of brightest red.
green, and yellow leathers, and hung in the sun-
light to make a braver show. In all that leather ba-
zaar we could not find a pair of the braided leather
sandals or buskins that at southern railway stations
are sold as Saharanpur or Kashmir shoes, farther
north are called Lahore shoes, and in Lahore are
called Peshawar shoes. The Pathan public very
generally wore the same conventional Mohamme-
dan heelless slippers, with the pointed and curling
bows and high sterns of antique junks. Some
few wore wood or rawhide sandals fastened by
heavy thongs, the most primitive and archaic of
foot-gear. There was a narrow strip of railed-off,

THE END OP THE INDIAN EMPIRE 267

sacred ground down the middle of this shoe bazaar,
which held some venerated Moslem tombs, and scores
of devout ones, ranging themselves before them,
saluted the glowing west beyond which lay Mecca.
They prostrated themselves on their bits of carpets,
and prayed fervently, deaf to the hum of cobblers
and idlers around them.

There were sweetmeat sellers and sugar-cane ped-
dlers hawking their wares through all the bazaars;
letter-writers plying their craft in the open ; schools
of small turbans rocking in studious circles around
some pious teacher; and barbers, lawyers, peddlers,
touts, and jugglers. And there were beggars, too !
Such beggars ! Such tattered and picturesque fig-
ures as never before diverted one,— Afghan and Bo-
khara beggars, shaggy and ragged beyond all the
religious mendicants of India. Coats of a hundred
patches hung in a hundred shreds from the frowzy,
turbanless ones, and but half protected them from the
keen mountain winds that blew through the bazaars
at sunset. Many of these were Pathan ''saints,"
who live in caves in the hills, lead revolts, and urge
the murder of unbelievers. The more holy of these
beggars cast glances of scorn and hatred at us
Kafirs or unbelievers; "white pagans," they called
us, to the perturbation of our bearer, who seemed
to fear that some one of these Islam saints might
brain him with his long pipe-stem, but with six an-
nas and a yard of sugar-cane the maddest molla of
them all was bought over to stand tamely before the
kodak. A few of the holy men coaxed annas from
the crowds with songs and story-telling, — even an

268 WINTER INDIA

infidel anna came not amiss,— while others had for
sale furs, rugs, and bits of soft jade or heavily-
veined turquoise. Not this side of Samarkand had I
expected to see men with rugs piled on their heads
and shoulders, throwing them down at sight of a
possible customer, and displaying there on the dusty
ground what treasures or trash they possessed.
Men with bales of furs and poshtins, or sheepskin
coats, for sale, paraded the bazaars or lounged
by gates and bridges. One scowling giant had for
sale a dead peacock, a sacred Hindu bird, another
showed a leopard-skin; and there were blue-eyed,
woolly Persian cats on view, whose dispositions had
been so crossed somewhere in transit that they would
only spit, glare, and claw at any possible purchasers
who ventured near.

The jewelers' dens had their gossiping groups,
and the leisurely jewel merchants produced bags,
tins, and bottles of seventh-rate pearls and talisman
turquoises, cemented on sticks, all quoted at soaring
prices. A woman in a gaily-embroidered red and
yellow phulkari or Afghan head-sheet, who sat
watching the hammering of a bracelet, was a moving
exhibit of jewels, that furnished a feast to the eye
when combined with her own beauty. But we were
plainly no feast to her scornful eyes, and, after a
critical inventory of our dusty traveling attire, her
glances and shrugs sufficiently translated her re-
marks to the merchant of high prices and doubtful
gems.

Even to that far end of the Indian Empire, the
tout dogged one's steps with his monotonous plead-

1 UK .MAIi Mnl.l.A. I'KSH AWAl:

THE END OP THE INDIAN EMPIRE 271

ing : ' * Please come my shop ! Please come my shop ! ' *
and our repeated "Jaos!" glanced harmlessly past
his ear. To stop the whining pleas of the most per-
sistent one we followed him down a side street, up a
dark stairway, and on to a flat roof from which
we reached inner rooms piled high with rugs and
stuffs, where we might sit on floor cushions and toss
glittering embroideries and rolls of shadowy-pat-
terned Bokhara silks and sheeny stuffs from "silken
Samarkand" to our hearts' content. In another
shop men were busily ornamenting squares of dark
cloth with showy Afghan waxwork. A pan of a
white, waxy dough stood on a charcoal brazier beside
each worker, who, laying a dab of the hot compound
on the back of his hand as a palette, drew from it a
long, viscous thread which he dropped in continuous
arabesques and traceries over a faintly outlined pat-
tern. This waxen relief was dusted over with silver,
gold, or bronze powder before it cooled, and there
resulted gaudy and tawdry curtains and table-covers,
that in dusty, mildewed, and bedrabbled condition
add to the fustiness and shabbiness of so many Brit-
ish-India hotel interiors.

There was a picturesque salt and corn bazaar in
a vast open space, and the fragrance and the cheery
music of popping corn drew us directly to the booth
where, in a huge turban and tremendous trousers,
the pop-corn man stirred the snapping kernels with
a bunch of twigs in a great, shallow iron pan. The
pan rested on the same rude mud oven and was fur-
nished with the same layer of black sand as is used
by hot-chestnut men in Peking and all North China.

272 WINTER INDIA

Peshawar pop-corn was as edible under its Pushtu
name as at the Chicago World's Fair, barring the
grit of the black sand driven into every snowy ker-
nel. Sweetmeat shops and peddlers' stands over-
flowed with gujack and kindred candies, thickly pep-
pered with the dust of the streets.

The caravans bring down the white Kabul grapes
which, packed in cotton in small, round wooden boxes,
are sold at remotest railway stations all over India
each winter; and such mountainous stores of pis-
tachios, almonds, walnuts, raisins, figs, and fruits
from fertile Afghan and Persian vales, as made one
imagine a great horn of plenty had been tipped
through the Khyber Pass and its contents spread over
Peshawar plain. For twenty centuries at least the
povindahs, or traveling merchants, have brought car-
avans down from Kabul, Bokhara, and Samarkand
every autumn. They bring horses, wool, woolen
stuffs, silks, dyes, gold thread, fruits, and precious
stones, fighting and buying their way to British
lines, where, leaving their arms, they are free and
safe to wander at will to Delhi, Agra, and Calcutta,
appearing even at Rangoon and Tuticorin each win-
ter. The railway has changed something of their
habits now, and all save the horse-dealers leave their
animals to graze near Peshawar while they take
train to the uttermost parts of the peninsula, and,
returning when their wares are sold, lead their
camels back to the cool plateaus and valleys of the
north for the summer.

Kafila, or caravans, bringing more and more of
Afghan wares, were defiling in through the city

THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE 273

gates, and toward sundown the great square of the
caravansary was full of groaning camels, and the
loads of merchandise grew to mountain heights.
A fountain and a sacred spot of prayer is reserved
in the center of the serai, and there caravan-
men and camel-drivers cleansed and prayed, their
faces to the west, oblivious of all the acre of pro-
testing beasts and wrangling men, screaming ped-
dlers, chanting beggars, and even the shouts of a
bear-leader, who danced and wrestled with his
shaggy pet to the very edges of the prayer-carpets.
The serai's inclosure, the Ghor Kattri, has always
been holy ground. On this spot first stood the great
vihara of Kanishka's time that was four hundred
feet high and a quarter of a mile in circumference,
chief fane when all this valley was head center of
Buddhism. To it came Pahien and Hiouen Thsang,
those Chinese pilgrims of the fifth and seventh cen-
turies, who, crossing Tatary and Turkestan, came
down through the Khyber Pass to visit the holy
lands of the Buddhist faith. In their time, too, a
great suburban stupa sheltered the golden begging-
bowl of Sakya-Muni, "the holy grail of Eastern
legends," which, brought here from Benares, was
carried to Persia, and then is said to have been
looted by a marauder and taken to Kandahar; and
Mohammedans treasure the so-called Buddha's bowl
— a great bronze or iron caldron. Peshawar once
had its Bodhi-druma (Tree of Knowledge), de-
scendant of the Bo-tree at Buddha-Gaya, planted
by Kanishka, the Scythian ruler of the Panjab,
according to one legend j it had already grown

274 WINTER INDIA

to a shelter sufficient for Buddha when he ap-
peared to foretell the coming of Kanishka, ac-
cording to another version. At any rate, it was a
pipul-tree of uncommon size, and held in such es-
teem that the conquering Baber, the Bokharan, saw
and described it when he came this way in 1505. All
this Peshawar plain has yielded rich store of Bud-
dhist relies, records, sculptures, and inscriptions,
including the finest examples shown in the Lahore
and Calcutta museums and in London.

The holy spot of Peshawar, in these modern times,
is the jail, where so many hillside saints from the
border have been put for stalking British sentries,
sniping stragglers, and inciting the tribesmen to
mischief and revolt in the name of the Prophet,
that the great barred building is crowded at times
with these vagabonds. As the abode of saints,
the building has all the sacredness and vogue of a
temple, and is a place of popular pilgrimage. Fanatic
Mohammedans have even committed petty crimes
in bazaar and cantonment for the sole purpose of
gaining admission to this saints' abode and rest:
and, with such crazy people to deal with, one may
well admire the spectacle of England's humane and
patient rule on the border.

From the top of the city wall near the old temple
there was a fine view of the city, the hazy, lilac
plain, and the snow-striped mountains just showing
through the clouds of mingled dust and frost-haze
on the Jamrud road. The rugged mountains rose
and grew sharper in outline as the sun fell, one
higher and whiter peak marking where the Khyber

THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE 275

cleaves its way through to the Afghan plain of
Jellalabad, only forty miles distant. But beyond
the Safed Koh lies— Russia! And upon all that
northwestern sky we saw projected the great shadow
of the double eagle, rather than the Afghan sym-
bol of the tree.

The gold and ruby mists of the plain soon faded to
cold violet shadows and purple darkness, and the
flat white roofs around us were indefinite when the
great demonstration in the sky was over. The crisp
autumn air grew momently sharper as we haggled
through the gharry door for a last bargain in Bo-
khara silk, and drove, that January night, to the
dark, cheerless, stone-floored dak bangla which stood
a thousand feet above sea-level, north latitude thirty-
four degrees, Fahrenheit many less.

15

CHAPTER XX

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS

NE who reads much of British and An-
glo-Indian print learns that the In-
dian Empire is not only bounded on
the north by the Himalayas and their
continuation, the Hindu Kush, but
that running with these lofty boundaries are artifi-
cial, imaginary lines marking the administrative,
the defensive, the strategic, political, geographic,
actual, military, temporary, and prospective fron-
tiers. Then, too, says Lord Curzon (London Times,
December 20, 1894) : "Our frontier must be, not hy-
pothetical, fluctuating, adventitious, but definite,
recognizable, scientific," adding yet more to the list
of qualitative adjectives commonly applied to the
word frontier— never meaning anything, however,
but the northwest frontier, in Anglo-Indian speech.
One might naturally wish to see the region of such
an aggregation of frontiers, where boundaries run
like contour-lines on a topographic map— the waver-
ing, imaginary lines upon the earth's Asiatic sur-
face, for which, and to which, literally, millions of
lives have been sacrificed — expressions of an "idea"
for which many more lives must be given.

276

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 277

One hears, too, the Russian advance daily dis-
cussed and harped upon all over India, until it
becomes as real a fact as the Aryan migration
or the Mogul invasion, and one wishes to see
where the next great history-making incident will
certainly occur— the theater where the greatest
world-drama since Timur's time will be played.
One becomes so familiar with this fixed idea of the
Russians coming down through the Khyber Pass
and snatching the great jewel of the British crown,
that he can jest with British friends about all
Anglo-India lying awake of nights, frightened by
the Russian bogy, and can advise them to rent the
Panjab to Russia outright, and so have it over with
quickly, and enjoy sound sleep again. But the
Briton takes his northwest frontier— his many fron-
tiers—seriously, sees the Russian hand in every lit-
tle border war, and finds no humor in the charge
that every time he cries, ' ' The Russian ! The Rus-
sian!" as Afridis, Waziris, and Kafirs revolt, he
is playing the part of the boy who too often cried,
"The wolf! The wolf !"— albeit this boy claims
to have found many incriminating documents and
positive proof of the trail of the Muscovite wolf
in the abandoned camps and villages of warring
tribesmen.

It was bitterly cold that night in the govern-
ment house of rest for travelers ; and as the two
opposite doors of our grand salon of a room gave
directly upon garden and court, we had sweeps of
icy air through it whenever a servant entered, and
such currents across the floor from two-inch cracks

278 WINTER INDIA

below each door that we soon retreated to the high
string-beds, and, wrapped in rugs and razais,
longed for steam-heated and furnace-cheered
America. The small pocket of a fireplace sheltered
some hissing green twigs that smoldered and filled
the room with smoke which refused to escape by a
transom window sixteen feet up in the absurdly
high, windward wall — which same north window
was ropeless and wedged open to encourage further
the icy drafts that encircled us. The khansamah,
bearing the courses of the dinner, was swept in with
a small gale each time, but we dined well on the
usual Indian menu. The khansamah made a final
entry on the wings of the wind, bearing proudly the
proper British tart of conclusion. "But, missis — "
he pleaded in injured tones when I too had said,
"No, thanks." I had too often suffered in ar-
guments with British pastry to hazard it in far
places, but I relented to this courteous old soul and
gave the heavy serving-spoon the swing and force
of a golfer's club, when pouf! pou-s-sh! went a
fountain spray of minute flakes of true puff-paste
up into the air and down in showers all over the
table. And we gathered them up— every last flimsy
flakelet— and with praises consumed the khansa-
mah's masterpiece, the very apotheosis of covered
apple-pie, the most supremely perfect tart the Brit-
ish flag ever floated over — away off there in the
shadow of the Hindu Kush, on the borderland of
the heart of the world, close to the old Aryan home
of the pie people's first ancestors.

"Pie, sir," said Henry Ward Beecher, "goes with

THROUGH KHYBEK PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 279

civilization ; where there is no civilization, there is
no pie. ' ' Hence Peshawar, etc. ; and one more count
may be added to the great total of what England has
done for India.

In what seemed only the middle of that arctic
night we heard our servant beating on the cook-
house door with such an alarum as might herald the
coming of the Russians; and after the misery of
a candle-light breakfast we drove away in the frosty
dawn, the sun rising behind us in a haze of pink and
purple, lilac and burning crimson, as we made
straight toward the mountain wall. The carriage-
road to Jamrud fort runs for all the ten miles close
beside the caravan track, on which were lines of slow-
moving camels, enveloped in clouds of glorified
golden dust— a fine, loose sort of powder, as light and
dry and white as flour or snow, covering the broad
caravan track five and six inches deep. Every one
abroad was beating his arms and stamping his feet
to keep warm, and we soon shrouded our heads in
rugs as shelter from the icy wind and choking dust,
and to hide from our sight the path of the projected
railway which travelers now use to Jamrud.

At Jamrud fort, towering picturesquely at the
edge of the plain, we gave up the spacious carriage
and waited for guard-mount and the signal-shot to
declare the Khyber open for the day. This last
British outpost was apparently the frontier. We
must then have been close to Afghanistan. But
no. Lord Curzon had written (London Times, Jan-
uary 2, 1895), "Without exaggeration it may be
said, that where Afghan territory commences, there

280 WINTER INDIA

British territory ends, and that the true British
frontier is not at Jamrud, but at Lundi Khana. "
Yet the political agent would not let us go even
to that edge of India and look over; would only
guarantee our safety to and let us drive as far
as Ali Masjid, half-way to Lundi Khana. A merely
hypothetical frontier that of Ali Masjid, and Jam-
rud nothing but the administrative frontier.

The native officer on duty at the Jamrud gates
took our passes and presented the visitors' book, in
which register it was written and underscored:
''Gentlemen visiting Khyber Pass are requested not
to give money to the sowars, as it is setting a dan-
gerous precedent" — advice which seemed reason-
able when my special military escort for the day
appeared, climbed up promptly on the back seat of
a tum-tum, and laid his Enfield rifle across his
knee. We felt the need of arms ourselves when we
saw that handsome, evil, reckless-looking young ban-
dit playing knight-errant for the day, tidily dressed
in brown khaki unifonn, his fine turban-cloth fringed
with gold, and his lean, Israelitish face lighted with
the evil eye of generations of robber ancestors.

Low ridges before us rose to hills, and they to
mountains, and three miles away at Kadam is the
real entrance, the beginning of the pass that leads to
Afghanistan and the mystic lands of Central Asia,
through which a procession of conquerors have come.
Out there have gone only the British, bent on puni-
tive expeditions and to the questionable triumphs
of what Sir Charles Dilke calls, ''thrashing the Af-
ghans into loving us."

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 281

No other mountain-pass in the world has had and
retains such strategic importance and holds so many
historic associations as this Khyber gateway to the
Indian plain. In the thirty-three miles of its length
it cuts through cliffs of shale and limestone rock,
and from an elevation of sixteen hundred and sev-
enty feet above the sea at Jamrud it rises to thirty-
three hundred and seventy-three feet at Lundi Ko-
tal, beyond Lundi Khana, and is never closed by
snow in winter. One does not see snow-fields nor
glaciers, nor the wild, stupendous scenery that such
a pass in such a mountain-range should have. The
winter is the season of greatest caravan trade and
travel, since the original, woolly, two-humped Bac-
trian camel, native of the Pamirs, does not endure
hot weather well, and, as in North China, can only
travel at night in midsummer, while he performs
his longest journeys in winter.

This mountainous borderland between India and
Afghanistan is occupied by the independent tribes,
who yield allegiance to neither emperor nor amir,
who never have been nor will be brought thoroughly
under subjection. Numbering over two hundred
and fifty thousand, all Mohammedans, easily in-
flamed through religious fanaticism, and ready to re-
spond to any jehad, or holy war, these independent
border tribes are to be counted with on every occa-
sion. The twenty thousand Afridis living in the
immediate Peshawar frontier are the most turbu-
lent, fanatical, irresponsible tribe of all, ever ripe
for revolt, always scheming and conspiring, ready
to attack the power that supports them with sub-

282 WINTER INDIA

sidies,— literally quarreling with their own liread
and butter, or, what is more vital, with their own
powder and shot. Loot, ambush, and murder, rick-
burning and cattle-poisoning are daily or nightly
amusements of these fire-worshipers turned fire-eat-
ers, who have waylaid, harried, and hung on the
rear of every body of troops that ever entered this
defile— even turning Alexander the Great away from
the Khyber, so that Bucephalus was forced to pick
his steps to northward and eastward and bear his
master down through the Michni Pass to the Pesha-
war plain. They have always lived by pillage and
blackmail, taking a subsidy to guard and protect
the British transport trains in the last Afghan war,
and then plundering the baggage and commissariat
trains every night, cutting off and sniping every
straggler and deserter with as much zeal as they
had shown in robbing Shere Ali's train. The steal-
ing of arms and ammunition goes on all along the
Peshawar border, neither Sepoys nor English sol-
diers proving any match for these accomplished
thieves, descended from generations of freebooters
and plunderers, dedicated to the craft by regular
ceremonies at birth, and holding skill in that line
as their greatest pride and boast. They have stolen
the carbines of European guards sleeping on those
arms in the guard-house, taking even the sword of
the sentry as he rested it against the wall beside
him; and they maintain a steady freemasonry of
communication with the British troops through spies
and confederates in the native regiments and de-
serters returned to their tribes. Any saint or

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 283

akhoond or Mad Moll a can inflame them and start
them on a religious crusade against the infidel, and
every little hill village has its saint or saint's tomb
to make it a place of distinction and pious pil-
grimage. It is even told of one clan of Afridis
that, lacking such pious attraction in their village,
they lured a saint their way, killed him, and set up
a tomb worthy of neighborly envy.

"Nothing is finer than their physique, or worse
than their morals," wrote Sir II. Edwards long ago;
and Sir Richard Temple has said: "Now these tribes
are savages, noble savages perhaps, and not with-
out some tincture of virtue and generosity, but still
absolutely barbarians, nevertheless. They have no-
thing approaching to government or civil institu-
tions ; they have, for the most part, no education ;
they have nominally a religion, but Mohammedan-
ism as understood by them is no better, or per-
haps is actually worse, than the creeds of the wildest
races of the earth. In their eyes the one great com-
mandment is blood for blood, and fire and sword
for all infidels."

"We are content with discord, we are content
with alarms, we are content with blood, but we will
never be content with a master," said one of these
turbulent turbans to Elphinstone; and the Amir
was well rid of the lot when the Gandamak Treaty
in 1879 declared these tribes independent, nominally
under the political control of the British, who have
vainly tried the policy of conciliation and subsidy
varied with occasional thrashings. Only personal
influence, and rough and ready, quick justice can

284 WINTER INDIA

avail with them. Colonel Warburton held them
wonderfully in check for twenty years by a kindly,
paternal rule, and their confidence in him justified
the saying that his presence on the frontier was
worth any ten garrisons. He retired when his age
limit was reached, and on the heels of his departure
came the revolt of the tribes and the closing of the
Khyber. Colonel Warburton offered his services
to return to India and try to pacify the tribes again,
but they were declined, and the border war con-
tinued from July, 1897, to January, 1898, General
Lockhart for months employing against these hill
guerrillas a greater army than that which defeated
Napoleon at Waterloo.

"The forward party" of Anglo-Indians argues
that these border tribes are an inexhaustible recruit-
ing-ground of the finest fighting material in the
world, and that for the British not to avail them-
selves of it would be virtually giving Russia this
almost ready-made army. Another faction argues
that the tribesmen, once drilled and taught the tac-
tics of war, will be more formidable enemies of
the British than ever, more ready to revolt, to join
Afghans or Russians. Lugubrious prophets declare
that when the struggle comes the British must
win the first battle in Afghanistan or lose all India
—the Mohammedan Nizam of Hyderabad, with his
great army, being arbiter of the destinies of India,
in any serious disturbances that may arise with
Mohammedans on the northwest frontier. One
specialist even wrote out and tabulated his fears
in a "confidential book" to his government, in

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 285

which he figured out every detail of the probable
Russian transport problems, their line of march, the
points of attack, and their possible resistance. A
copy of this confidential and reliable guide to the
conquest of India was promptly obtained by the
Russian government, translated and sent broadcast
through the Russian army as a manual of tactics,
a handy sort of military Murray for Muscovite
use when the Czar is quite ready for another win-
ter visit to India. Russia has now reached the Pa-
mirs and the borders of Kashmir; Bokhara is hers,
and Persia, virtually; exploring parties of Russian
soldiers have twice crossed the Hindu Kush, sur-
prised of course to find they were in India, within
British lines; and Kipling has depicted the Russian
spy in "The Man Who Was," in which the retir-
ing Dirkovich says, "Au revoir!" and, pointing to
the Khyber, adds, ''That way is always open."

The conquest of India is the dream and the duty
of all Russians, and having closely followed every
other clause of advice in that remarkable and much-
questioned paper known as the will of Peter the
Great, they are not once forgetting this one :

VIII. Bear in mind that the commerce of India is the com-
merce of the world, that he who can exclusively control it is the
dictator of Europe ; no occasion should therefore be lost to pro-
voke war with Persia, to hasten its decay, to advance to the
Persian Gulf, and then to endeavor to re-establish the ancient
trade of the Levant through Sj'ria.

While England has been pushing her frontiers
northward for the good of the native, and to give the

286 WINTER INDIA

Pathans good government, schools, hospitals, pure
water, and sanitary redemption generally, Russia,
the pure philanthropist, is pushing her frontiers
southward with the sole object of evangelizing the
Khanates and bringing these people out of spiritual
darkness.

Through the efforts of Colonel Warburton, for
twenty years the political agent at Peshawar (and
a worthy successor of those other splendid examples
of the British official, Lawrence, Edwards, and
Nicholson, and those rare men of earlier border and
Mutiny days), the marauding tribesmen were taken
in firm hand when their independence was guaran-
teed. The Afridis themselves were made to guard
and guarantee the safety of travelers in the Khyber,
one of the most remarkable examples of setting
a thief to catch a thief that was ever known. From
1879 to 1897 the government paid an annual subsidy
of eighty thousand rupees to the Afridi and Shin-
wari clans on condition that they keep open and
guard the caravan track through the pass, live in
peace, and do not raid British territory. By tolls
levied on each camel and vehicle passing Jamrud,
the Indian government raised annually an amount
sufficient to pay off part of the subsidy and main-
tain "Colonel Warburton 's road," as the tribesmen
call it. Following easy grades, this road could be as
easily traversed by an artillery train as by light
tum-tums ; although, to avoid expensive cuttings and
tunnels, the projected railway into Afghanistan will
follow the track of Alexander the Great along the
Kabul River and through the Michni Pass.

CAK.WANS IN llli; KIIYRKK I'ASS.

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 289

Colonel Warburton made levies of tribesmen, con-
stituted them the Khyber Rifles, to police and guard
the pass, and assigned them to six fortified posts
between Jamrud and Lundi Kotal, A force of eight
hundred infantry and thirty troopers were recruited
from the wild robbers of the region and set to keep-
ing off the other robbers. The infantry were paid
nine rupees a month, the troopers twenty-six rupees,
each man providing his own khaki uniform, and
the trooper the keep of his own horse. Their com-
mander. Colonel Islam Khan, who drilled and
brought the corps to such efficiency and roused in
these hill guerrillas the military pride that seemed
to animate them when once inside the Queen's uni-
form, is a descendant of the former ruling Afghan
family, and served with the British in the last Af-
ghan war. On caravan days his sentries were sta-
tioned at every hundred yards along the pass, troop-
ers patrolled it, and the Khyber was as safe as
Broadway or Piccadilly,— safe until the sunset gun
proclaimed the military day ended, and the Khyber
sowars, dropping uniforms and rifles, became pred-
atory tribesmen again, ready to loot a camel, cut
a throat, steal the arras of any soldier, or make away
with any stray man, horse, or camel found out after
dark.

Bugle-calls and rifle-shots announced that the
pass was open, the gates of the serai below Jamrud
swung back, and some six hundred scornful and
unhappy-looking camels, with great shags of fur on
neck and legs, dragged their deliberate way out, and
in single file went swayiag along the road to Af-

290 WINTER INDIA

ghanistan. Each belled leader was led by a man
on foot, and other camels were fastened one to an-
other by long guide-ropes. Groups of shaggy cara-
van-men paused to pray by a wayside shrine at the
outset of their journey, and then trudged on, they
no better groomed, no more sociable or joyful than
their camels.

Our bearer was in a panic of fright. "Yes, you
must drive fast," he said, with chattering teeth and
timorous looks over his shoulder. "I tell you true.
I am your servant, not your enemy. These Kabul-ly
men are all Russians, enemies of the country, bad
and dangerous. They shoot— hang ! They kill—
hang! every time. They always rob. Hold fast your
money. Let no one see your watch to-day. These
Kabul-ly men are not men. They are animals— wild
animals of the jungle. They fight, they cut, they
shoot!— oh! oh!"

**But there is the sowar and his gun. We need
not be afraid," I said.

"Yes," said the trembling Hindu, "that is just
the danger. All these Pathans are devils. Sowar
one day, robber next day. They take England's
money; shoot and rob England's men. They are
all Russians, enemies of the country. Just now the
sowar is England's soldier. Pour-o'clock gun goes
hang! and he is wild man again, England's enemy."

The smooth, hard carriage-road wound farther in
among the yellow hills, and the camel-train was
soon far behind and out of sight. We were as an
advance-guard, the first passengers of the day, and
the riflemen sitting on the rocks and perched on

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 291

hill crests every hundred yards exchanged greeting
glances with the sowar that sent more cold chills
down the inert Hindu spine. There were round stone
towers and square mud towers of defense as thick
as sentry-boxes, and the khaki clothes and turbans,
toning in with the stones and barren ground, made
many of the sentries invisible until we saw a gun-
barrel move or a bayonet flash. It was a radiant,
perfect, sunny day, the sky one vast pale turquoise,
soft and pure and gently blue, and in among the
hills the air was still, and only fresh enough to
make the swift ride exhilarating. Around Kadam's
mud hovels there were innumerable caves in the
hills, where hermits had lived in meditation in Bud-
dhist days, and where Mohammedan saints of un-
washed and doubtful sanctity now spend lives of
leisure, enjoying the climate and view, subsisting
on villagers' offerings, and giving themselves to
much mad exhortation, animadversion of England's
rule, and mouthings of Allah il allah!

There the pass really begins— a narrow ravine
which runs between steep heights. Battlemented
walls and far fortresses on crests suggested all the
frontiers we had come to see, but it was a deserted
road. There was no procession of brigands coming
down steep places at the back of the stage, as would
have become the historic pass. The identical defile
where rode Timur and Jenghiz Khan, Baber the
Bokharan, and Nadir Shah with the Great Mo-
gul's Koh-i-nur in his turban and ten jeweled pea-
cock thrones following after him— really, at the be-
ginning, this defile lacks the wild, melodramatic

292 WINTER INDIA

scenery appropriate to its history. It was not as
striking, in the landscape way, as the Nankow Pass
by the Great Wall of China. At every little up-
grade my pony balked until the sais got down and
led him by out-stretched bridle to the top of the
hill. When I demurred at myself dismounting to
walk up the next trifling hill, the gentle sais whined :
"Gentlemen go Khyber Pass always walk up hills."
The sowar lounged in splendid ease on the back seat
of his tum-tum, dawdling his Enfield on his knee,
and watching us from on high as we toiled up each
gentle gradient after him.

"How about that sowar? If gentlemen always
walk up hills in Khyber Pass, why does n't he get
down and walk?"

' ' Oh ! Sowar no gentleman, ' ' said the naive one.
But at the next hill a disgusted Khyberi, no gentle-
man that he was, dismounted and walked too.

At last Ali Majid's battlemented towers, crown-
ing a pyramidal hill at the middle of the pass, came
in range, most picturesque of many great fortresses
of India, completing the wild landscape which, in
turn, it conunands. There the pass is narrowest,
only fifteen yards from wall to wall, and a steep
zigzag path leads up to the deep gateway of the
old Afghan stronghold. From that aery there is a
bird's-eye view down the narrow defile. The history
of this Gibraltar is an unbroken record of attack,
siege, defense, and slaughter— last captured, recap-
tured, and burned in 1897. Beyond Ali Masjid
we might not go, and we could only look up the
narrow rock corridor, soon closed to view by a jut-

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 293

ting point, and imagine the Buddhist stupas and
inscriptions we might not see— Samarkand four
hundred and fifty miles away in air line, seven hun-
dred and fifty by caravan road.

By noon, a far tinkling told that the camels were
coming, and the caravans bound down from the for-
tified serai at Lundi Khana, where they had rested
the night, reached Ali Masjid's gorge. The shaggy,
swaying animals, with their shaggy keepers, made
fitting pictures in that wild glen. Traces of vivid
Bokhara waistcoats illuminated a few dingy figures,
but for real, theatrical effect the troupe needed
fresh costuming. Some of the caravan-men stood
stock-still, rooted, transfixed, and stared at us ; others
feigned indifference; and others vented Pushtu
curses.

Then tum-tums passed us, speeding on from Pesha-
war toward Kabul, and a two-horse trap, very
nearly a buckboard, that was filled with prosperous
Kabul merchants, ranks above common povindahs,
all shapeless fur bundles topped with preposterous
turbans. Gaily domed ekkas, like idols' cars, and
filled with squatting figures, sped by; other ekkas,
with curtains discreetly screening the traveling
females, and drawn by ponies wearing blue bead
necklaces, went on toward Kabul ; and then came the
tum-tum of a mission worker from Peshawar, who
had essayed the task of reaching the Pathan heart,
of subduing the wild Afridi villagers with Christian
teaching. Some heroic-looking old men on spirited
Kabul horses pranced by; a mounted Khyberi A\dth
pennoned lance made a picture as he cantered up ;

16

294 WINTER INDIA

and all the while the shaggy men afoot and the
strings of camels went noiselessly on, their rocking,
wavering, swaying motion, the slow, deliberate, me-
thodical lifting and placing of the soft feet, exer-
cising a sort of hypnotic charm.

"Why do these Kabul-ly men have such white
faces and blue eyes like Englishmen?" we asked
our servant, who quailed when any of them glared
curiously at him.

"Oh, it is very cold at Kabul, and they eat so
much white grapes and fruit. That makes them
white men. Kabul-ly grapes are very dear, and
poor Hindu cannot buy."

Then, nearly all the long way back to Jamrud, we
were meeting and overtaking strings of camels —
camels to right of us and camels to left of us,
camels ahead and camels behind, that thrust their
unpleasant heads, with their foaming lips and yel-
low teeth, altogether too near. Once when the sowar
fended away a too-friendly camel with his rifle-
barrel, there came such screams, groans, and shrieks
from the insulted beast that we felt that all the
vaunted dangers of the pass were understated, and
that the camels were as dangerous as the Khyberis.
The diamond hitch is not known in Afghanistan
evidently, for the loads were balanced rather than
girded on, and cinching seems never to have been
applied to the camel's waist-line. The drivers were
continually rearranging loads that had tilted over
or worked loose, and bending their triple-jointed
legs, gaunt beasts with elongated necks sat down
and protested to the echoing canon walls while

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 295

their burdens were clumsily fastened again. Kodak
film was reeled away regardless of the distance
from the cantonment photographer's dark-room,
and still the caravans came on, bringing silk, carpets,
wool, furs, fruits, and sweetmeats from Kabul ; while
up from Peshawar came blocks of rock-salt, chests
of Indian tea, and all of Birmingham's wares, to-
gether with an unending movement of British piece-
goods, into the heart of the great continent.

As we came out to wide reaches between the de-
creasing hills, the road was all our own again, save
for the lounging sentries here and there among the
rocks. Soon we emerged on the plain, the hills
closed behind us, and there was spread the view that
has gladdened the heart and thrilled the pulses of
every marauding conqueror from the north ; but for
us the land of romance and mystery lay behind us,
among, beyond the frontiers. The real spice, the
greatest element of danger, was gone, too, when the
sowar swung himself down from the tum-tum and
strolled off to his barracks with a scornful smile of
good-by— a smile that grimly seemed to promise a
less conventional meeting.

Once beyond Jamrud walls, our Hindu bearer
recovered heart and spirits, and chattered and ges-
ticulated almost joyfully with the sais all the dusty
ride back to Peshawar, as one who had faced certain
death and escaped it.

There was the same scramble by the wild mob
on the Khairabad platform when we again sighted the
great Attock fort and bridge across the Indus.
There was uproar among as many mad Pathans as

296 WINTER INDIA

ever, and it seemed as though there must always be
more Afghans than room for them on the railway.
The Bengali station-master, who greeted us as old
acquaintances when we returned safely to his the-
atrical platform and its wild war drama, stood by
our window and talked, and heeded this riot and the
mingled roars in Pushtu no more than the ripples
of the Indus on the stones below. Six-foot ruffians,
with rage and hate distorting their countenances,
ramped the platform and flung themselves in heaps
before each third-class door, each man with enough
extra cloth flapping, bagging, flying loose and trail-
ing after him to clothe two other men in European
patterns. Each bawled and beat the air like a mad-
man, screaming rage and defiance at the earlier oc-
cupants of compartments where not another foot
nor elbow could be insinuated by the most deter-
mined of these hairy giants. And still the Bengali
talked gently on, airily admitting that the Afghans
were a very bad lot. "But Abdurrahman can man-
age them as no one else can. They all fear him.
When he dies we will have the war,"

''Tell me about the Khyber Pass. How did you
get permission to go there? What did you go for?"
bluntly asked a German cavalry officer when we
had returned to table d'hote circles at Lahore. He
cross-examined me as to every civil, social, military,
and geographic fact that might have come under
my observation. "You wanted to see the live Pa-
thans because Herr Kipling has written? and to
see where Alexander came through ? ' '

We charged the uhlan with wishing to see where

THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS 297

the next world contest will be fought, where the
Russians are coming through,

* ' Umh-umh ! Yes ! I may want to see where we
might want to come through ourselves."

"You! The Germans in India?"

"Certainly. Why not?"

"But will you come as the ally of the Sultan or
the Czar?"

"Ally?" he repeated, in apparent amazement.

CHAPTER XXI

AMPJTSAR

IHERE was a combination hotel and
dak bangla under one roof at Am-
ritsar that was as amusing as anything
in comic opera. We arrived at the
dak bangla late at night, and moved
to the hotel in the morning, by merely crossing the
hall. Instead of being served in our own cold, white
vault of a bedchamber in the bangla, we dined in
the lofty, drafty banquet-hall of the hotel quite
as comfortably as if in the train-shed of a railway
station on a winter night. All the doors of the
place were besieged by insistent touts who sang the
same song, ''Please come my shop. Please buy my
shop," thrust greasy cards at us, clung to the car-
riage-steps, and outdid their tribesmen elsewhere.

Amritsar, as the holy city of the Sikhs, has an im-
portance and a character distinct from all other
places. It is as large a city as Delhi, and for ages
has been a great trade-center, lying on the main
caravan routes from Central Asia and Kashmir.
The streets show a mixture of races, and for color
and picturesqueness the bazaars equal those of La-
hore. Nearly every man wore a chudda of either

298

AMRITSAR 299

vivid red, green, or orange, and if we had remained
another day I should have succumbed to the pre-
vailing mode, assumed a bright-red shawl, and with
it the theatrical pose and stride, the flap and fling
of loose ends of drapery. The Sikhs, "the Swiss of
Asia," were old friends, whom I had known before
I knew the Pan jab— the splendid statuesque, red-
turbaned policemen of Shanghai and Hong Kong,
"the red-top men" of such terror to Chinese male-
factors. Originally Hindus, their Luther protested
against caste and idolatry and denounced the cor-
ruption of the Brahmans; and, just before Colum-
bus's voyage to America, he established his dissent-
ing sect near Lahore, Akbar showed tolerance and
granted them the sacred pool at Amritsar, but his
successors persecuted them, tortured their leaders,
and so aroused their national and military spirit
that after many battles they established their in-
dependence in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Their last great leader was Runjeet Singh, after
whose death in 1839 they embroiled themselves with
the English, were defeated at Gujerat in 1849,
and the Koh-i-nur went with the Panjab to the
victors, and now the pensioned descendants of their
ruler live as country gentlemen and champion
cricket-players in England, marrying with the
English nobility. The Sikhs' loyalty during the
Mutiny gave them a prestige still preserved, and
these stalwart and interesting people are claimed
by the Magyars as long-lost Aryan kinfolk, many
common words and the common fashion of beards
first suggesting the relationship. While the old

300 WINTER INDIA

men of the Sikhs bewail that their people are back-
sliding and drifting into Hinduism, a stranger sees
that they are as anti-Hindu as anti-Mohammedan;
that they pray to the east, refuse tobacco, in-
dulge in spirits, eat pork, and button their coats
to the right — if only because their opponents do
otherwise. While they venerate the cow, they loathe
the saffron color of the Hindu fakir and love the
blue the Hindu hates. The Sikh never shaves or
trims his hair or beard, parting the latter and twist-
ing and tucking it behind his ears and under the tur-
ban. He always wears a sword, if only the minia-
ture tulwar in his turban, and he terrorizes the
timid babu, the limp Bengali, and the cowardly
Kashmiri as he does the Chinese, and in general is
the first man one meets in India.

The heart of the Sikh city and the soul of its peo-
ple is the Golden Temple in the center of the sacred
tank, the Pool of Immortality, and for beauty and
impressiveness this Amritsar shrine is second only
to the Taj Mahal. Marble terraces and balustrades
surround the tank, and a marble causeway leads
across the water to a graceful marble temple whose
gilded walls, roof, dome, and cupolas, with vivid
touches of red curtains, are reflected in the still pool.
One gets the first view from a high terrace by the
modern Gothic clock-tower, where the Sikh guards
halt one until he has removed his shoes. A bearded
giant exchanged our shoes for huge felt slippers
that were damp and even wet, and led us around the
white terrace. The palaces and gardens of Sikh
nobles surround the tank, and the path is bordered

AMRITSAR 303

with venders of fruit, flowers, and turban orna-
ments. Processions of brilliantly clad people passed
under the towered gate of the causeway and out over
the path on the water; and, doubled in reflections,
it all seemed too picturesque, too theatrical to be
real. Only the north door of the temple is open to
Europeans, but the bearded priests sitting in a gold
and painted hall before a magnificently bound
Granth, or sacred scriptures, over which the atten-
dants waved brushes, received us kindly. Pigeons
flew in and out the arched openings with their mas-
sive silver doors; the musicians pounded and blew;
the priests sat chanting before the jeweled Granth,
which is the object of adoration to the sect, and after
we had made our offerings, threw jasmine wreaths
over our shoulders and gave us fragrant oranges.
The Sikh visitors worshipfully knelt, offering
money, cowries, and flowers before the book, and,
garlanded in return, were conducted with us to the
upper chamber of the temple to see even richer wall
decorations of mirrors and gilded fretwork. The
place is so precious that it is swept and dusted only
with peacock feathers. The silver doors of the tem-
ple stand open day and night, and the chanted ser-
vices are continual, and on moonlight nights in sum-
mer this fairy floating temple must seem a dream.
Only the chill of those wet felt slippers on that cold
winter morning could have hurried us away from
the enchanting place; but, sneezing and shivering
violently, we fled, and although we spent two more
days in Amritsar, we were content to view the tem-
ple from the terrace.

304 WINTER INDIA

Gardens, forts, towers, other temples and palaces
dwindled in interest by comparison with the bazaars
and street crowds of Amritsar, and hours went by
rapidly as we followed the narrow streets of this
truly Persian and Central Asian city. In the cara-
vansary by the city walls we saw such delightfully
tattered and patched and lusty beggars from Yar-
kand and Bokhara as no fancy could picture. They
are last in the train of pilgrims that come down
from the north each winter, taking train at Amritsar
and excursion steamer at Bombay for the pilgrimage
to Mecca. These plump, red-cheeked, Tatar-faced beg-
gars beat time on a triangle and sang an appealing
verse or two, accompanying it with dramatic and
graceful gestures; and they wished us long life,
health, and wealth in return for our infidel annas.
Other Yarkand men came out from the arches of
the quadrangle, some blue-eyed and with faces ab-
surdly Teutonic, their originally white skins tinged
with sunburn and dirt until, like the Sikhs, they
were a dark leather or ginger color. Some were
horse-dealers, others had brought wool, silk, jade,
turquoises, and agate for sale. All wore long, fur-
bordered, wool or wadded coats, with real sleeves
and seams in them, instead of the loose ends of cot-
ton and pashmina cloth of the people of the Indian
plains. One man in an old Russian military coat
and top-boots looked the veritable stage secret-
service man, and then we remembered that in
this caravansary Kim slept and listened. But how
we reveled in the streets and bazaars beyond !
The quarter of the shoemakers, where gaudy Mo-

AMRITSAR 305

hammedan slippers dandled in gorgeous strings
and bunches, and leather-workers bent over rain-
bow tasks ! The wool-shops, where Bokhara cam-
els' wool and Kashmir and Rampur pashmina cloths
overflowed from open sacks and bales! And yarn-
shops, hung over with skeins of every color! Dye-
shops, where turban lengths hung dripping with
every brilliant fluid! Copper and brass and dam-
ascened metal shops, and shops for the sale of
coarse carpets and dhurries, of skin bottles and
earthen bowls,— all were fascinating. The shops, how-
ever, were the dens of shawl-shops, where pale, fine-
featured Kashmiris sat embroidering shawl borders
with silks and gold thread. The little Kashmiri
boys, with their great eyes and long lashes, were
charming creatures, fine products of an old race and
an old civilization, purest Aryans of all these people ;
but the bearded Sikhs despise the Kashmiri only a
little less than they despise the Bengali. The gen-
tle, esthetic Kashmiri is not a fighting man, and
there are thousands of pure and mixed Kashmir
weavers and embroiderers long resident in Amritsar
who still quail before the giant Sikhs.

We found the jewelers' row, where women who
were themselves walking jewel-shops sat bargaining ;
and we found the gem-cutters' dens, where jade
blocks from Yarkand and farther Turkestan were
sawed, cut, and polished. Jewel-boxes, knife-han-
dles, knife-blades, ear-rings, bracelets, slabs, and me-
dallions for Delhi jewelers to inlay with precious
stones, were all being evolved from the rough lumps
of green stone by means of the primitive bow-string

306 WINTER INDIA

drill and emery-wheel driven by the foot. There
was a sociable jade merchant of silky, persuasive
manners, who lost much time trying to convince
me that gray was green and that any soft stone, if
it were even grayish-green, was jade, and that brown
streaks and white clouds were desirable variations
in the monotonous monochrome surface. After this
prelude, he produced better pieces of this most fas-
cinating and oldest lucky stone in the world. Bul-
lock-carts crowded us to the wall and camel-trains
brushed contemptuously through the narrow bazaars.
One camel, loaded with baskets, scraped a destroy-
ing path through the tortuous lane, tearing down
flimsy awnings and curtains, sweeping signs and
trade samples along and tramping them under his
spongy feet, while the shrieks of the despoiled trades-
men filled the air.

All the way touts dogged our steps. "Please come
my shop. Please buy my shop," rang in my ear
whenever I stopped to look or to point the camera.
They followed us, pleading, if we walked ; they leaped
off and on the carriage-step if we drove ; and ' ' Jao ! ' '
had no significance to them save when emphasized
by the bearer's stick. One persistent nagger drove
us almost to frenzy with his lamentations and up-
Hraidings whenever we stopped at a shop-front. We
bade him " Jao !" and to stay "jao," but he was om-
nipresent, and to get rid of him we went to his shop.
He had nothing but weather-worn rubbish; and
while he ran to borrow stock from a neighbor we
made our escape.

At the large carpet-factory ninety-seven looms

AMRITSAR 309

were strung with cotton warp, and little Kashmiri
boys, sitting elbow to elbow before them, tied in the
wool threads, cut them with miniature scythes, and
pressed down the stitches with wooden combs. A
spectacled old Kashmiri, seated behind each curtain
of warp-threads, read off the directions for the pat-
tern from pages of Kashmir cipher, all understand-
ing and following this ancient, conventional cipher
by inherited association more easily than any of the
clear, mechanical directions devised and used by the
managers of jail carpet-works. Four small boys,
with one old man to read the pattern to them, will
make a fine, close, velvet-pile carpet, measuring
eleven by thirteen feet, in two months and a half, — a
carpet worth twenty-five dollars gold at Amritsar.
The design is chosen, the materials allotted, and the
contract let to the reader, who pays each boy three
or four rupees a month. Conventional old Turk-
ish and Persian designs are followed. They are first
drawn in colors, traced on sealed paper, graded to
the number of warp-threads, and the pattern writ-
ten in Kashmir cipher. The small boys work me-
chanically, tying on two, four, or twenty stitches,
as the reader calls to them, paying little heed to
what is growing under their fingers, whether scroll,
leaf, or stripe. "Two pink, three green, one red,"
chant the boys in monotones after the reader. The
reader watches the pattern grow, and, detecting a
false stitch, raps the offender with the stick he
holds for the purpose. The carpets are valued both
for the fineness of the stitches and the quality of
the wool, the ordinary "fine old Persian, or Tabriz,

310 WINTER INDIA

rug" of Western auction-rooms costing eleven and
twelve rupees a square yard in Amritsar; while a
copy of a precious old wine-red Bokhara rug they
were then weaving of fine pashmina or shawl wool
was worth fifty rupees a square yard.

Each loom was a genre picture and a color study,
with the spectacled Kashmiri in sober turban and
jacket on one side, and on the other the row of long-
lashed boys in brilliant garments, elbowing and
shoving one another and tittering together, quite as
all children behave in the presence of school visitors.
No finished carpets could be seen or bought, since
the looms were working overtime, a year behind their
orders. New York buyers order largely each year,
and large consignments go to London and Paris.
There were shawls for sale, bales and bales of them,
and stitched in silk threads at the end of each
chudda was the number of warp -threads, by which
their fineness and value are determined. They are
kept in press between boards, and when one bought
the silky fabric it was sewed in Kashmir wax-cloth
and sealed in a clumsy tin box.

So very enchanting did we find these bazaars that
we lingered another day and yet another, to feast
on their picturesque setting and incidents each
warm, Indian-summery afternoon. Then we has-
tened to the guard-house terrace overlooking the
tank and the Golden Temple, and watched that build-
ing of beauty, whose reflection seemed to float upon
the splendid sunset sky.

We hurried back to the bazaars again, to see the
narrow, irregular lanes illuminated with every kind

AMRITSAK 311

of poor, crude, clumsy lamp and lantern, tallow
dip, rush-light, saucer of oil, and floating wick,
fagot, and torch. Shadows hid the dirt and in-
congruities; each unique thing had its right value;
and we haggled over blue-embroidered Yarkand
felt rugs, over striped Ludhiana lungis or gold-shot
cotton turban-cloths, over jade and blue ferozees
and the shadowy Bokhara silks, far into the frosty
darkness up to the late dinner-hour.

CHAPTER XXir

SIMLA

IMRITSAR'S railway platform— the
same where Kim was put off the train
for want of a ticket to Ambala, and by
his wits was soon on board again— was
most picturesque the noonday we
started for Simla. A man in a blue coat with yel-
low cuffs and a red shawl thrown over his shoulder
was only first figure in the crowd of red, blue,
orange, and green-shawled creatures, in turbans of
red, pink, orange, lemon, and salmon, in blue and
gray Ludhiana lungis with gold-striped ends. An
ash-smeared fakir crouched gibbering by the wall
near the tank labeled, "Water for Mohammedans,"
and a high-caste Brahman protected water sacred to
his co-religionists' use. A woman whose jewelry
was but half concealed by a thin sari held an um-
brella down over her face as she squatted on the
concrete, and her owner threw a sheet over the um-
brella and fiercely guarded the beehive tent. From
this retreat, the woman peered forth, clashed and
jangled her jewels to attract our attention, and made
eager signs for us to come near that she might inspect
us.

312

SIMLA 313

All afternoon we rode straight toward a long, blue
horizon-line that grew, until at sunset, at Ambala,
we had the great wall of the Himalayas plainly be-
fore us. We changed trains, and jolted over the
thirty-five miles to Kalka in complete darkness. At
nine o'clock we stumbled through a dark, deserted
village to the so-called hotel, which was a little bet-
ter than a stable only in that it had not yet been
used for horses. We spread our bedding in chill,
whitewashed, stone-floored rooms opening upon a
stone porch; and once more in darkness followed a
lantern through the streets to the post-office. There
we agreed to pay the government of India, or the
postmaster-general, seventy-five rupees for a "tonga
phaeton," i. e., a two-pony victoria, with sixteen re-
lays of ponies, for the fifty-seven-mile drive up to
Simla and return.

Wholly by our own energies we got the establish-
ment astir the next morning at half -past six o'clock.
The worst coffee in India was brought, with the
usual smoky toast and repulsive butter-plate— this
at perhaps the only hotel in India ever patronized
by the official class, and which the smart, the luxury-
loving and disdainful, must endure twice a year if
they go to Simla. Western civilization in India,
taking the hotel as its index, is at lowest ebb at
Kalka.

Our tonga, or "fitton" in native colloquial, ar-
rived at our door before sunrise, drawn by two bul-
locks. We mounted and were slowly dragged to the
post-office, from which exact point the government
had agreed to transport us. The two ponies were

17

314 WINTER INDIA

then affixed,— "as per contract," said the babu,—
made fast by traces running to a tonga, or steel bar
fastened yoke-wise to both girths. Away they went
by leaps and bounds, and at a gallop, up hill, around
corners, and along a country road through the foot-
hills. Every three or four miles, the driver winded
his horn, the ponies redoubled their efforts to run
away, and we bounded into a tonga station, where
the relay ponies stood waiting in harness. The steel
bar was loosened and pinned to the girths of the
new ponies, the traces and reins made fast, and we
shot forth at the fixed gait of eight miles an hour.

It was a clear, cloudless day, with hoar-frost over
the grass of the bare hillsides and on the rice-fields
that in curving terraces filled every valley and ra-
vine, rippling away in lines that seemed designed
for ornament only. There were plantations of trees,
but no forests — none of the jungles that one expects
at the foot of such a mountain-range. In the dis-
tance clumps of intensely green Pimis longi folia
waved their nine- and ten-inch-long needles as softly
as bamboos. We mounted long inclines, whence we
had a magnificent view of the hills and plains be-
low, or looked up and across to the loops of the road
above us. Sometimes we could watch the next relay
station as we drove toward it, and with the glasses
note the preparations for our arrival. Bullock-trains
under guard of sepoys, low mail-tongas bringing
convalescents down from the sanatoriums, and a
few camel-trains passed by. The bearded Sikhs, the
turbaned Pathans, and the handsome Kashmiris of
Lahore and Amritsar streets had vanished, and in

SIMLA 317

their places appeared a nondescript people in sober
attire, — sturdy hill-men whose clothes and cheek-
bones had the same Chinese suggestion as those
of the hill-folk around Darjiling, At ten- thirty we
shook off our razais and rugs and limped into the dak
bangla at Solon, with fierce mountain appetites
added to what naturally succeeded the imitation of
a breakfast at Kalka. A courteous old khansamah,
with a velvet manner and perfect decorum, ush-
ered us to a dining-room where the chill of Hima-
layan summits lingered, and we soon had the table
brought out to the sunny veranda. Twenty-seven
miles of travel, and a lift of a few thousand feet
in air, had raised the art of cookery far above its
level at Kalka, and we breakfasted with enthusiasm.
While two plunging animals refused either to be
led or backed up to the ''fitton," the babu informed
us that this was the best post-road in India; that
it had the best carriages and best ponies; that the
government pays one and two hundred rupees for
the best Peshawar and Agra horses, and sells them
cheap at the end of six or eight months, since only
the best stock will do for or can stand the Simla
travel. Across the valley we could see twenty horses
sunning themselves before the next station, ready
for the day's relays, and our early start gave us the
choice of the successive stables. From Solon the
road led steadily up over bare brown hills, marked
by the path of landslides or the green of afforestation
efforts, set with candlestick cacti and striped with
an occasional patch of snow. All the boulders were
painted over with and the pine groves stuck full of

318 WINTER INDIA

advertisements of a certain "Green Seal Whisky,"
the Himalayas as gaudy as a London omnibus or
railway station. At last a turn revealed to us the
snowy range, far away up against the sky, and then
Simla's straggling crescent of houses was seen across
a great chasm or valley. In seven hours and a half
—just the time taken for the trifling trains to climb
to Darjiling — we reached the Simla tonga station,
seven thousand and eighty-five feet above the sea.

It was the place of the ' ' Phantom Rickshaw, ' ' but
what a material vehicle appeared to us ! No wonder
it is spelled with an unnecessary "c" and a bar-
barous "w," or with any alphabetical lumber that
can be dragged in by Anglo-Indians. Nothing could
be more ludicrous in a farce or burlesque in a Jap-
anese theater than such a vehicle. Four thousand
miles by road and centuries of intelligent devel-
opment lie between the Tokio jinrikisha and the
Simla "jinny rickshaw" — the one an airy seat
on flying wheels; the other a solid, clumsy cart, a
rattling, rumbling affair of cast-iron and thick
planks, drawn by four shuffling coolies, who walk
leaning against the long tongue or the back board
of the undersized juggernaut.

A late tiffin awaited us in the ramshackle wooden
hotel, which, patched, shabby, and unsightly, was
in the hands of workmen getting ready for the open-
ing of the season in March, The landlord was volu-
ble and kind, for tourists never come to the hill-
tops in winter, and he gave us the best of the shabby
old rooms— dark, sunless holes, with cheap furniture
and fittings so long past their day that they might

SIMLA 319

well be put in a mnseum of last-century crudities.
Yet here fashion and arrogance abide from March
to November, and the gayest social life goes on,
despite the frightful thunder- and hail-storms — rains
that are nearly water-spouts and cloud-bursts, and
that continue for three months.

It was like turning the pages of ''Plain Tales from
the Hills" even to read the street signs as we lum-
bered about that crescent ridge of the summer capi-
tal. Jakko, the Mall, the Ladies' Mile, Elysium Hill,
and all the rest were there, and we traveled the same
road that Mr. Isaacs and the fair English girl rode
together. There were the shops of jewelers, — in one
of which Kim and the other boy counted the loose
stones in trays, — shops of silk, silver, and curio mer-
chants, of milliners and pastry-cooks, all boarded
fast for the winter, and behind them the ramshackle
buildings of the native bazaar dropped along the
hillsides in crazy terraces. There were English
villas and cottages, and nothing Oriental or truly
Indian in the aspect of the place, and we had a
stranger's feeling. Our slow-moving coolies were
barefooted and barelegged, and when they stepped
aside from the beaten track of slush to let bullock-
trains pass, they often stood more than ankle deep
in snow. As the setting sun played a fire-pageant
over the line of snow-peaks, the chill mountain
air penetrated our wraps and rugs, but the red-
cheeked English girls in cotton shirt-waists strolled
slowly home with their tennis rackets, as if it were
a day in June. How we wished we might go with
them; that they would ask us to follow on and

320 WINTER INDIA

have a cup of tea and meet Mrs. Hauksbee, the Gads-
bys, and all the rest we knew so well ! We wanted,
too, to hear more about those long-past seasons when
occult science and the new religion were setting
Simla wild; when Mme. Blavatsky, the suspected
Russian spy, was working her miracles, and great
mahatmas and yogis were arriving from nowhere,
with nothing in their hands, and letters dropped
from the ceiling as commonly as from the post-
man 's bag. A. P. Sinnett, the editor of the Pioneer,
was leader in the occult movement, and by his
"Esoteric Buddhism" and "Karma" theosophy
spread to the Occident. We had glimpses of those
days in "Mr. Isaacs," and Mr. Crawford's Ram
Lai is to be taken seriously. The whole clumsy fraud
had been exposed when Kipling came, and in "The
Sending of Dana Da" we have an irreverent
account of a specimen case. When all the clap-
trap and collusion, the mechanical devices and
unblushing frauds had been exposed, laughter shook
the Himalayan hills, and the rich natives, who had
financed the apostles as furthering a crusade against
Christianity and mission work, were left in tears.
The London Society for Psychical Research sent
their keenest investigator, and there was no mys-
tery left— Isis was completely unveiled, and theoso-
phy has since been a dead issue in Simla ; and all its
miracles were proved to be in line with Dana Da's
sending of the kittens.

In February we walked the terraced promenade
by the reservoir alone, and had the sunset view of
the snowy range quite to ourselves. Three small

SIMLA 321

Anglo-Indians lingered by the cathedral door. We
asked them the name of the large, white peak that
rose above the long, snowy ridge. "I don't know
the name. The snows— just the snows— is what we
always call them," said one Wee Willie.

Even the landlord made a wry face when we said
we had come to see Simla as a tribute to Kipling;
that we should not have been satisfied to leave India
without visiting this scene of so many of his stories.
We assured the landlord— manager, rather— that
we could not have appreciated nor understood In-
dia but for Kipling, nor Kipling but for India;
that we now realized our debt to Kipling and the
measure of his genius. The manager did not make
vigorous protest, like all the other Anglo-Indians,
for the wise man quarrels not with his bread and
butter, and women who make pleasure-trips to Simla
in February are not to be held accountable beyond
the regular per diem rates in rupees.

The nights at Simla were something to benumb
an arctic explorer, and it was a relief to rise in dark-
ness and leave the tonga station long before the
sunrise glow was seen beyond Jakko's heights. As
we galloped away and down, the shadow of the
Plimalayas retreated from the tawny, hazy plain—
a plain, as level and vast as the ocean, lying be-
neath the frost-haze. We had another sunny break-
fast at Solon, and, timing our halts, we found two
minutes by the watch sufficient to change ponies at
any station. At ten minutes past two o'clock, seven
hours after leaving Simla, we were at Kalka post-
ofiice, and a train soon carried us on to Ambala,

322 WINTER INDIA

where a four-hour wait was enlivened by the de-
parture of a wedding-party from the cantonment.
Ladies in laces and pale pink goAvns brightened the
dark train-shed and platforms as they threw slip-
pers and rice. Silk-hatted men in frock-coats and
pearl trousers covered the rails with torpedoes that
gave joyful salute as the wheels rolled over them.
A gorgeously turbaned person in a gold brocade
dressing-gown and silver-toed, green leather slippers,
and who ought to have been one of the hill rajas
we forever read about, caught the eye completely.
Sad to say, he was only the coachman of a polo-play-
ing hill raja who had sent the bride and groom to
the train in his state landau.

CHAPTER XXIII

ALWAR

|HE snporior tourist in India nsnally
makes a point of his acquaintance with
rulers of native states, generally harps
on the fact unduly, and raises bitter-
ness in the heart of the plain tourist
and common sight-seer, who cannot refer casually
to the rajas, diwans, residents, and political agents
he knows. "I was the guest of the raja at So-and-
So," **I was put up at the maharaja's bangla in
Here-and-There, " say such enviable beings. One
listens with envy and deep humility if he does
not know that a card from one's consul, even a
courteously worded note from the tourist himself,
will secure one the privilege of stopping at the gov-
ernment rest-house or raja's bangla in a native state
— at a fixed price for his lodging and carriage. One
makes the usual grand tour and sees the great sights
of India without leaving British territory, although
one third of the area and one fifth the population
of India are under native rule. Hyderabad in the
Deccan, where the Nizam rules twelve millions of
people occupying a territory as large as Italy, Udai-
pur (spelled in seventy-two different ways), Jodh-

323

324 WINTER INDIA

pur, Baroda, Indore, Alwar, Gwalior, and Kashmir
are the native states the tourist finds most worth see-
ing. "I am only visiting native states on this trip,"
said one superior traveler. "I do not care for the
beaten track." When we met him on the grand
thoroughfare weeks later and asked as to his enjoy-
ment of innermost India, he denounced native rulers

in sweeping terms. ' ' I arrived in the day the

raja died in Calcutta, so there was nothing doing
there, unless I waited a week to see a funeral. I

presented my letter to the diwan at and he

said: 'I am very sorry, but His Highness has been
so intoxicated for the past fortnight that he has not
seen any one. He is drinking a bottle of brandy and
one of chartreuse a day, in addition to much cham-
pagne and Scotch and soda. I really cannot say
when His Highness will be fit to receive visitors

again.' At it rained cats and dogs, the

bangla leaked, the bedding was wet, and the food
bad, and I came away without presenting my letter.
All India is off the beaten track,"

We stopped at Alwar, in Rajputana, on our way
back to Agra to keep our engagement with the Feb-
ruary moon in the garden of the Taj. We reached Al-
war station, as we had reached so many other places,
between one and two o'clock in the morning. There
was no carriage, no khansamah, nor any one from
the maharaja's bangla to meet us— only sodden
darkness and the platform of the small railway sta-
tion. A tiny ekka was found, and in some way we,
with the luggage and bearer, managed to get in
the absurd little cab, and a mite of a pony managed

ALWAR 327

to pull us to the bangla. A sleepy khansamah made
us comfortable for the rest of the night.

A relay of messengers, and finally a victoria with
men in blue palace livery, came from the diwan, or
prime minister of the tiny empire, at nine in the
morning. We were driven to his house, and went
through many anterooms to a cool, dark inner draw-
ing-room, where a portly personage in a mixed Ori-
ental and European costume of white flannel re-
ceived us with great cordiality. His little daughter,
in a woolen hood and many calico coats, but with only
jingling anklets to keep her little bare brown feet
and legs warm, was brought in and duly admired,
and then he presented one Soorajbux, the learned
librarian of the high school, who was detailed
as our cicerone for the day. He took us first to the
modern palace, a suburban villa full of European
furniture and notions, where the young raja spent
his occasional vacations from the Mayo College at
Ajmir. Among the incongruities in the raja's study
was a framed chromolithograph of Wood's single-
apron binder at work in an American wheat-field.
There were inclined planes as well as staircases that
the ruler might ride to his bedchamber if he wished,
and a beautiful durbar hall with carved window-
lattices. From the upper windows we looked down
upon a sunken garden, once a sacred tank, where
fern- and orchid-houses overflowed with beautiful
plants; and by avenues of bo- and banian-trees we
reached the garden of the lions, tigers, and bears,
home also of wonderful red, blue, and yellow parrots
who uttered long Rajput sentences.

328 WINTER INDIA

We drove rapidly back to the city and through
the bazaars, where women in gaily embroidered phul-
karis set with looking-glasses seemed to have walked
away in those long-favored decorations of British
drawing-rooms. We saw the stables, the five hundred
horses, the forty elephants tramping and swinging
their trunks in idleness "for the honor and glory of
the raja," and then made another dash through city
streets, with the populace saluting the palace equi-
page. In one court of the palace, an elephant in
state trappings and a body-guard of soldiers waited
before the temple where the raja's mother was pray-
ing. In the next court, the bearded keeper of the
library waited for us in highly impatient mood.
He had been waiting for hours, by the diwan's
command, and, with much communing in his beard,
he produced the books which are Alwar's pride—
a beautifully illuminated Koran, a gorgeous Gu-
listan whose medallions, letters, and borders would
excite a Western bibliophile, many Persian books
illuminated by the best old Delhi painters,— and
showed us one room full of sacred Vedas.

We were taken on to farther courts and through
many marble halls to the banquet-hall, where the
long dining-table was of solid silver. The water
ran gurgling in silver channels down its length, and
jeweled birds in gold and silver cages warbled over
this precious garden-bed. There was a beautiful
white-marble durbar hall with carved balconies and
lattices, and a glittering Shish Mahal adjoining it,
all a dazzle of mirrors and colored glass. It further
overlooked a great tank or lake surrounded by mar-

ALWAR 329

ble terraces, balustrades, and pavilions, with a rug-
ged mountain fortress crowning the perpendicular
rock mass beyond the tank. It was a fairyland sight
by day, and when illuminated for viceregal fetes
must transcend all Indian fantasies. A picturesque
old turban claimed us and led the way to the armory,
where room after room was filled with weapons with
murderous and agonizing edges and points; their
handles jeweled, carved, inlaid, and damascened ; the
blades wonderfully tempered, mottled and grained,
often chased and inlaid with verses. One sword-
blade had a shallow runnel near the hilt, in which a
dozen loose pearls ran up and down in the gummy
ooze of oil left by the zealous cleaners. Sword-hilts
set with pearls, rubies, and diamonds; jade hilts
jeweled all over; and hilts of Jeypore enamel were
the delight of the gleeful, proud old armorer, who
had a dramatic way of drawing a blade, giving it
a flourish in air, and presenting it suddenly level
with one's eyes for close inspection. We had finally
to tear ourselves away from the array of more and
more terrible weapons his minions brought from
some inexhaustible storehouse— spears, daggers, ele-
phant-goads, battle-axes, and chopping-knives of
terrible ingenuity. The jewels of Alwar, the emer-
ald cup, and the precious cabochon fringes would
take pages to themselves, rivaling as they do the
collections of temples.

We were hurried out to the white court overlooked
by the zenana windows to see the return of the maha-
rani,— such a spectacular scene that it was a pity
the central figure in it was so curtained and veiled

330 WINTER INDIA

as not to be able to see it herself. Lancers on horse-
back, state elephants and color-bearers, first ap-
peared in the white archway and, with the troops,
ranged themselves around the dazzling court. Sil-
ver palanquins with red silk curtains held the royal
ladies, and three hundred women attendants muffled
in red, yellow, and white draperies chanted as they
walked beside them. It was such a brilliant pageant
that we could hardly believe it the ordinary week-
day proceeding. To prove how much more splendid
Alwar rulers could be on gala occasions, they showed
us a two-story red and gold elephant carriage in
which fifty people ride in state processions, and store-
houses full of jeweled elephant trappings.

Then we saw the chetahs, or hunting leopards,
huge spotted yellow cats, blindfolded and wearing
funny little leather caps, and tied head, tail, and
legs to a cage or skeleton stall. They stood inert
as wooden cats, and would neither growl, snap,
nor even wink when the keepers tried to rouse them,
two men lifting a chetah and setting it down as
they might lift and move a four-legged table. In
the jail yard and workshops the law breakers were
contentedly weaving carpets, dhurries, and cloth,
making paper, grinding corn, and otherwise mak-
ing themselves useful. The leader, a red-handed
murderer, chanted the carpet pattern, and his fel-
low-criminals bawled loudly in response, tying "one
green, three white, two blue" automatically. There
are already hereditary criminals in these modern,
comfortable jails, and the jail caste is fast becom-
ing a definite order.

.t I

ALWAR 333

Soorajbux took us to his high-school building,
showed us his illuminated Persian books, and asked
many naive questions about the outer world. ''The
Japanese— are they at all like the Hindus? Of what
religious caste are they? Are they civilized like
us?" And we left Soorajbux exclaiming: "What!
they are the most refined and artistic people in the
world ! Their art a revelation to and the despair
of all Europe ! They are more esthetic than the Eng-
lish ! How very wonderful ! Do the English
know it?"

In the afternoon the courteous old diwan returned
our visit, his yellow turban and suite sending the
bangla staff into such agitation that we barely
made the station and train in time as a fierce thun-
der-storm came on. We dined and waited a few
hours at Bandikui Junction, and then took train for
Agra, arriving at half-past three in the morning;
for, no matter from which direction the traveler
comes, it seems impossible ever to reach Agra at a
rational hour. We stopped this time at the hotel
where the German professor had enjoyed the grilled
mutton-chops, and a notice on the wall of my room
requested: "Visitors will please not beat the ser-
vants, but report them to the manager, who will
punish them, ' '

We revisited the Taj on a gray, cloudy morning,
the moist air heavy with the fragrance of flowers.
We sat again on the balcony of the Jasmine Tower
at the fort and watched a murky sunlight play upon
the distant white bubbles of the Taj, and then took
an afternoon train for Cwalior. The whole time-

334 WINTER INDIA

table of the Indian Midland Railway was put out of
joint and our train made an hour late by the lamp
dropping through the roof of our compartment.
Guards and station-masters at three stopping-places
chattered and gave frenzied orders, and while a
small lamp was in some way tied into the large
socket, nothing could bring a man of sufficiently
ignoble caste to wipe the oil and broken glass from
the floor.

CHAPTER XXIV

GWAIJOR

|FTER any experience with the ordinary
dak bangla and the up-country hotels,
the Mussaffirkhana, the maharaja's
rest-house at Gwalior, is a dream of
luxury. Used only to dirty carpets and
dhurries, or ancient reed mattings laid on cement
or mud floors, we rubbed our eyes at sight of the
shining white stairway, at the clean, soft-piled carpets
of the beautiful white villa, and more at the great-
windowed bedrooms that were actually furnished.
There were real bureaus and real beds — complete
beds with springs, mattresses, pillows, sheets, blan-
kets, and spreads ! AVe sat down in amaze, and the
sense of wonder was exhausted when we found every
lock, hinge, knob, and fastening of the doors and
windows in working order and the whole place spot-
lessly clean. Such sights had not been seen since
Colombo. Below-stairs the pretty drawing-room and
dining-room were as w^ell kept and modern. The
Mussaffirkhana was the greatest surprise in India,
the enlightened maharaja a special providence to
hardship-worn tourists fortunate enough to be per-
mitted to inhabit that abode of bliss, a literal rest-
is 335

336 WINTER INDIA

house and a temple of cleanliness and order. Natur-
ally we dreamed of American hotels and other high
products of our civilization, and happily waked to
find the Mussaffirkhana not a dream but luxurious
reality. After the chota hazri, as daintily perfect as
the little breakfast of a Paris hotel, we drove about
the well-kept town in a palace carriage, a perfectly
appointed victoria. The streets were lined with white
houses, whose tracery windows and ornamental bal-
conies were worthy an art museum. The street
crowds were most brilliant, and more yellow was worn
in Gwalior than elsewhere, along with the endless
variety of Mahratta turbans, which surpass in num-
ber and originality those of any other people. The
very imposing coachman snapped his whip and the
blooded horses sped away like the wind, straight
down the middle of each street, the sais yelping
shrill warnings, the crowds parting automatically
and saluting the palace livery. We saw the beauti-
ful unfinished temple to Sindhia 's mother, for which
the stone-cutters were chipping out as fine traceries
and latticings as any in Delhi or Agra, and then re-
turned for the serious British breakfast, at a table
fragrant with roses and mignonette. It was radiant,
mild, ideal spring weather, and after all our suf-
ferings from cold we basked with delight in the open
air, faring forth again to the foot of the rock-fortress
which rises like Gibraltar from the plain. A splen-
did elephant in red-velvet trappings stood waving
its trunk as we drove up, and at the word of com-
mand sank upon its hind legs in a deep courtesy,
stretched out its great body, slowly bent its fore

GWALIOR 339

legs and sank to the ground, and we climbed up a
ladder to the dos-a-dos car or saddle on its back.
With earthquake heaves, a rock this way and a lurch
that way, it stood erect and lumbered up the steep,
flagged path, through six defensive gateways, to the
blue-tiled walls of the "painted palace" at the edge
of the rock. We penetrated its deserted courts all
carved with flat traceries and arabesques and set
with enameled tilings and stone latticings, and from
the flat roof had an unlimited view over the level
yellow plain more than three hundred feet below.

Again our stately transport knelt, we climbed to
the red- velvet jaunting-car on its back, and it paced
across the flat, table-topped mesa to the half-ruined
Jain temples, where conquering Moguls wreaked
their fanatic zeal, chipping and mutilating the
myriad tiny figures in the bas-reliefs with which
walls and columns were covered, and further effacing
them with coats of chunam and whitewash. The
wealth of intricate ornament lavished on these
temples would be incomprehensible were there not
the perfect Jain temples at Mount Abu to show what
the shrines of Gwalior rock once were in less degree.
While we lingered at that angle of the rock's para-
pet to look down upon the city below us, the yellow-
turbaned mahout made his elephant do tricks like
any poodle. It picked up and threw stones, waved
its spotted ears and trunk as commanded, and nosed
up the tiniest coins from grass or gravel and gave
them to the mahout. It lumbered after us over the
grass as tamely as a kitten, its great soft feet shuf-
fling with a strange barefoot tread as it followed us

340 WINTER INDIA

to a pyramidal temple ruin very similar to the Bud-
dhist ruins in Java. The same indefatigable Major
Keith who rescued and preserved the old carved and
tiled palace worked over this temple, too, restoring
the gateway and replacing as far as possible every
carved fragment. We remounted, and the mahout
guided the monster down the road and then close
beside the parapet, goaded it until it was as close
to the coping as possible, and then bade us look
down and see the rock-sculptures that adorn the
perpendicular face of a ravine of the rock. With
three hundred feet of space below our feet, the
breathing of the elephant seeming enough to burst
the girths that bound the car to it, and its lurches
as it shifted its weight from one foot to the other
enough to propel us into the air, we cared nothing
for bas-reliefs and images. A tank far below, and
the winding white Lashkar road, seemed to sway in
air and rise toward us, and we clutched the car-
frame in agony and begged only to be taken down
to the safe level of the plain again, to horses and
wheeled vehicles. We could easily believe that much
elephant-riding makes one mad, and that the motion
and the heat of the elephant's body affect the spine
and shorten the life of a mahout. After the jerk-
ing and jolting of its downhill progress we gladly
left the gentle giantess in the red-velvet cloak sa-
laaming and putting its trunk to its forehead in
thanks, in ridiculous parody of the slim little mahout
beside it.

We were allowed to peep into the court of the
Jama Mas j id without unshoeing, and went then to

GWALIOR 341

see the splendid and impressive tomb of Mohammed
Ghaus, a Moslem saint of Akbar's time, who rests in
an immense domed hall shut in by sandstone lattices
of exquisite and intricate design. Next came the tomb
of Tansen, a musician, sheltered by a tamarind-tree
whose leaves, if chewed prayerfully, will secure one a
sweet voice. The dancing-girls come to worship at
this tomb, and tree after tree has been stripped of
leaves and killed, so that seedling descendants are
kept at hand to replace them.

'* Memsahib," said the bearer, excitedly, ** there
will be fight this day with lion, unicorn, and elephant.
Will memsahib see?" Learning that the unicorn
was a rhinoceros, we were ready to see the fray
which is the national pastime, as in Akbar's day.
A British major from Rawal Pindi cantonment,
showing India by winter to a visiting niece and
nephew, and staying at the Mussaffirkhana, implored
us so earnestly not to go that we deferred to his ad-
vice— and have regretted it ever since, wondering
how much of local color and national character we
missed in not seeing Sindhia's subjects at their fa-
vorite sport, to which bull-fighting must be child's
play.

The bazaars were brilliant enough when crowded
with white-clad Mahratta men in their fantastic tur-
bans, and Mahratta women in full, bunchy skirts of
every hue, swinging and tilting past, clashing and
jangling their anklets; but when a part of the raja's
body-guard, preceding the maharani on her way to
worship, paraded down a street of white houses,
the stage pageant was complete. Horsemen in gay

342 WINTEE INDIA

uniform and gorgeous turbans, with fluttering pen-
nons; horses in bright saddle-cloths, yellow bridles
and trimmings; a state elephant in red velvet and
gold trappings, with cloth-of-gold curtains to its
gilded howdah; and a troop of women surrounding
the gilded palanquin, made up a very spectacular
church parade. It was all so splendidly theatrical,
so really Oriental, as at Alwar, that we said: ''This
is the last touch, the perfect climax. Let us go
quickly, before the curtain falls, the people put on
their every-day clothes, and we are disillusioned. Let
Gwalior remain in memory with all the bloom of the
first overpowering impression. ' ' We would not wait
two days on the chance of meeting Sindhia himself
when he should return from a hunting-trip, and
we took train for Agra— arriving at midnight, of
course.

We had a quiet Sunday to revisit tombs in ap-
propriate observance of the day, and to sit again on
the Jasmine Tower and watch the sunset play over
the Taj Mahal. There was an unmistakable Sabbath
atmosphere to the view, although the dhobiemen
were swinging, pounding, and spreading out acres
of cloths to dry on the flats below the fort, and twit-
tering parrakeets flashed in and out of the creviced
wall, and fluttered over the dry moat where Akbar's
elephants and unicorns fought for his entertainment.
A sudden impulse seized us as the pageant began,
and we hurried to the gharry, implored the sais to
make all speed, and running through the garden of
the Taj, settled ourselves once more in the upper
story of the western minaret overhanging the river.

GWALIOR 343

The great white temple was richly yellow in the last
beams of the sun, with blue shadows in every recess.
Softly rolling white clouds across the Jumna took
on rose-lights and were reflected in the river. The
Taj flushed rose-pink, and before the golden burst
of the afterglow had faded the February moon rose
full, round, blood-red in the east. The vision was
complete. Fifteen times had we entered the garden
of the Taj, and each time the spell of the Taj was
stronger.

The next day dragged through with odds and ends
of sight-seeing until sunset. We dutifully did the
jail, the most populous in India, where often a thou-
sand prisoners are kept, and carpet-weaving is the
chief of many industries. Great efforts have been
made, by following the best old designs and using
only vegetable dyes, to attain a high standard and
keep the Agra carpets first in the foreign market.
Thirteen rupees a square yard is the average price,
and over five thousand yards are woven a year, the
jail earning 90,000 rupees a year by its industries.
Agra criminals long furnished the best jail carpets
in India, but good conduct reduced the time of some
and Jubilee benevolence released others of the best
long-sentence weavers, and the Agra carpets declined
for a time. That afternoon we stayed by the Jas-
mine Tower and watched the white bubbles on the
horizon flush rose-red for a brief moment against
a misty gray sky. Then white mists rolled up from
the river, and rain-clouds gathered and hid the Taj
IMahal forever from our view.

CHAPTER XXV

JEYPORE

|T Agra we were midway in the penin-
sula— eight hundred and forty-one
miles from Calcutta, and eight hun-
dred anc" forty-eight miles from Bom-
bay. It was very cold, and rain was
falling in sheets when we started, late at night, to
ride the one hundred and forty-nine miles to Jeypore,
and during the night it grew colder. Clouds of
dust came through the loose, rattling carriage-win-
dows, and when we shook off our razais at daylight,
near Jeypore, there was a small dust-storm in our
compartment.

The pompous, fat proprietor of the Hotel Kaiser-
i-Hind was strutting the platform in a solferino
plush coat, waving a telegram and shouting for
"Eliza! Eliza!" — meaning the person who had sent
the message. His rival, the proprietor of the dak
bangla, fawned at our elbow, beseeching us to come
to his house instead, and there was wordy war be-
tween the two across me, charge and counter-charge.
"I will furnish elephant for Amber, no charge!"
shouted one. ' ' Oh, memsahib ! memsahib ! ' ' hissed
the other, 'Hhat elephant no good elephant, not got

344

JEYPORE 345

teeth." "Mine is first-class family hotel," roared
the solferino villain. "Oh, his is dirty, rotten hotel,"
wailed the other. "Please come my house, please
come my house, I am poor man," bawled the bangla-
keeper, as the big solferino banged the carriage-door
on his trophies and climbed the box to guard us from
being kidnapped on the way.

The dining-room of the Kaiser-i-Hind was in the
cellar-like ground floor, and an outside staircase led
to the cement terrace or roof on which the bedrooms
opened— lofty rooms, with many doors and long win-
dows to admit air in the hot weather when the hotel
is empty, and fireplaces the size of a crumb-tray to
warm them on the frosty nights when the place is
filled with shivering, sneezing tourists. Two dozen
times the solferino one asked me if I wanted a guide
for Jeypore, and as many times he received the de-
cisive "No." Two babus were breakfasting in the
general room, quite like Europeans, and speedily
opened conversation. No discouragements could
check their volubility, and we watched to see what
game was premeditated. "I am not common man,"
said the larger turban. " I am prince. I am Nawab
of Behar. Go! fetch me those letters from the
duke, ' ' he said to his companion, who returned with
a greasy note, worn like a beggar's certificate. The
secretary of the Duke of Connaught had A\Titten to
"His Highness Mer Abdul-asal Alum Khan, Nawab
of Behar," to express condolences on the death of
the Nawab 's wife. Then this doubtful Nawab, eat-
ing in the public room of an inn with casteless un-
believers, told us that his family owned the Espla-

346 WINTER INDIA

nade Hotel in Bombay, and that he spent much time
there. He offered to telegraph to his brother-ruler
of Indore, or to any native state we might wish to
visit. He would even take us around Jeypore and
show us the sights, since he had nothing else to do
that day. He would take us to the shops— and then
all suspicions crystallized without this democratic
raja adding: "I will take you to the best shops. I
am not common man after commission. ' ' This latest
form of tout, the princely one of the table d 'hote, was
such an amusing climax to our touting experiences
that we could hardly keep serious countenances be-
fore the clumsy confidence-man and his accomplice.
His tongue ran on and on, in sheer joy in its run-
ning. "I want not commissions on what you buy.
I want not money in this world — only friends, and
weeping when I am dead." We could not tell how
much conspiracy there was between this pair and the
solferino landlord, who had been so persistent about
our taking a guide ; but the solferino one handed the
Nawab into a carriage with a great flourish just as
our "fitton" drew up. "You are going to the mu-
seum?" asked the Nawab. ''So are we"; and he
was whirled away without escort or outriders. He
stood on the museum steps dumbly staring when our
carriage went past him toward the city gates, and
when we did return to the museum, two hours later,
the Nawab was waiting and showed the strain of
that long suspense. The pair followed us from case
to case for a while, profuse in praises of what we
looked at longest, voluble until we put direct ques-
tions to them about the methods and processes of

JEYPORE 347

manufacture of some of the old art objects. "I can
find you shop to make you copy of anything you
see here," repeated the bogus Nawab several times
plaintively. To end the farce, which had then been
played long enough, we confided loudly to each other
in prearranged dialogue that we had not an anna left
for shopping in Jeypore — only our railway tickets
and rupees enough to get to Bombay. The Nawab
melted away without adieu and was seen no more.

This art museum, housed in a beautiful palace in
a park, is filled with the choicest examples of old
pottery, brass, enamel, gold- and silver-work, carv-
ing, weaving, embroidery, jewelry, and everything
else on which Indian fancy and genius lavished dec-
oration in the past. At the art school in the city
replicas of many of the museum objects were for
sale, and others could be commanded. The class of
young brass-beaters sat in the cellar-like entrance
of the school, beating out Saracenic traceries as bor-
ders of large brass trays sunk in beds of pitch ; and
a dyer and his wife next door walked up and down,
stretching between them to dry the rainbow-striped
cotton head-sheets which are a specialty of Jeypore.
Everywhere in this "rose-red city, half as old as
time," the street groups were so theatrically pictur-
esque that we forgot everything in watching them.
The city is new, architecturally, and its two long,
straight streets, crossing at right angles by the palace
walls, cause all picturesqueness to converge there.
The crowds were so brilliant and fantastic that one
remembers Jeypore as some pageant in grand opera,
the bazaars more spectacular than even those of La-

348 WINTER INDIA

hore. At noon, we saw the broad main street crowded
from curb to curb with men in white clothes, with
gay turbans and shawls,— a crowd that swayed and
surged and moved until the long expanse of turbans
was like a tulip-bed in the wind. It was the climax
of all Indian street scenes, and such a kaleidoscopic
play of color as could only be seen there on the day
telegraphic bulletins are received from the govern-
ment opium auctions, which fix the price of the drug
for the month.

At the great Four Corners there is a monumental
fountain, and there elephants continually pace by,
camel-trains pass and repass, and pigeons descend
in clouds if one tosses a few grains in air. Sheeted
women, with jingling anklets and full-swinging
skirts, come to the corner of the jewelers' bazaar
to buy their glass, brass, lacquer, and more precious
bangles and nose-rings. There were wedding pro-
cessions passing the fountain all that sunny day,
which had- been declared the lucky one of the month.
Many corteges were preceded by elephants in rich
velvet and bullion trappings, their faces, trunks, and
ears elaborately painted. Jeweled bridegrooms went
by in velvet-lined palkis hung from silver yokes, and
from time to time the processions halted, a canvas
was spread on the ground for the company to sit
on, and nautch-girls— middle-aged colored women
in bunchy accordion skirts and full panoply of
jewels — gave a deliberate song-and-dance interlude.
These mature sirens literally "trod" their slow-
footed measures in clumsy, dusty leather shoes that
a hod-carrier might wear. Each family circle wel-

JEYPORE 351

corned us to the company of wedding guests, and we
assisted at several such interludes. There was the
palace to see— a modern, tawdry, semi-European af-
fair of much plaster-work, mirrors, and gilding.
The carpets were rolled up in the throne-room of
the beautiful Audience Hall, the furniture covered
with brown holland, and the state treasurer, cross-
legged between two accountants, occupied it for the
day while he paid off the palace servants. We were
led down the long marble paths of the formal gar-
den to see— a billiard-room. But we saw, on the way,
the myriad-bay-windowed walls of the zenana, which
greatly resembled the street fronts of San Francisco
hotels. We saw the palace stables and two aged ele-
phants eating grass; and later in the day went to
"the lion and tiger museum" to see two real, live
unicorns. "See," said our bearer, "with how very
loose skins these unicorns are," as he led us to the
rhinoceroses' cage.

There were the regular, cut-and-dried tourists'
shops filled with crudely made weapons, rough
brasses and potteries, for which gullible folk pay
twice the London price ; and one such proprietor met
us at the door with his visitors' book and insisted
that we should read the praises of himself, his wares,
and the Indian tiffin he serves good patrons, written
but the day before by some young travelers from
New York. He dilated upon the virtues of Amer-
icans, and showed us the boxes and boxes of trumpery
stuff bought by those tourists ; and it was great com-
fort to us, the worthy poor, that we were not as the
millionaires are— to be taken in by Brummagem

352 WINTER INDIA

goods and cast-iron sword-blades at double the
Broadway prices.

At another shop of archaic weapons that had but
yesterday come from the foundry, we bought an
elephant-goad for peace and sociability's sake, and
sat for an hour to watch the panorama of the main
street. The bearded proprietor bubbled away at his
hooka and pointed out the Jeypore celebrities as
they went by — the prime minister, the chief magis-
trate, the political resident, — even the treasurer go-
ing in state, with an artillery escort, to pay visits.
A group of Brahmans bringing sacred Ganges water
from Benares had military escort, too, and a military
band; and there was an air of religious state to all
the great ekkas drawn by noble white bullocks, the
kincob curtains but half concealing the rainbow-
wrapped women within. Noble graybeards pranced
by on Arab horses, and five wedding processions,
with jeweled nautch-girls in gold-gauze dresses,
passed before us, the wise old elephants looking very
bored with all this fuss and f olderol over the marriage
of small boys. A customer came and bought some
big brasses ; a minion ran off and found a dilapidated
box for a few annas, and they patched and mended
it on the spot. Then the proprietor swept a glance
over the crowded thoroughfare and let forth wails
like a muezzin on a minaret. A woman, bent under
a great bundle of forage, stepped aside, dropped her
small haystack on the shelf -like floor of the shop,
and the packer's material was bought from her, a
simple, direct, and primitive proceeding that de-
lighted me.

JEYPORE 353

Such scorching sunshine and piercing winds were
never experienced together as in Jeypore. One
needed an umbrella as protection from the sun and
fur wraps as protection from the wind at the same
time. We tiffined in the icy dining-room and took
coffee on the scorching terrace, where merchants of
arms gathered daily to display their ancient weapons
—cast-iron stuff made to order in England to furnish
the "cozy corners" of Christendom, to hang on the
walls, and to prop up the divan draperies of so-
called Oriental rooms.

It was on one of the most brilliantly sunny and
piercingly cold days that we drove across the city
and out to the flat country beyond, where abandoned
gardens, crumbling tombs, lone minarets, and domes
lined the road, and alligators basked by neglected
tanks where green scum floated. As we drove into
a courtyard, a weary old elephant with a painted
face sadly in need of retouching saluted us with
foot and trunk. It knelt, and we climbed to a
rickety charpoy, or string-bed frame, covered with
doubtful razais. After the noble beast at Gwalior,
with its splendid trappings and comfortable jaunt-
ing-car, this ill-pacing, moth-eaten, tourist elephant
of the Raja of Jeypore was a disappointment; and
after it had lurched and lumbered along a few miles
that we might have done more comfortably in the
carriage, our disgust was unbounded. We were dis-
enchanted before the creature began the steep ascent
to the deserted palace of Amber, delighted that
the elephant is fast being relegated to the back-
ground, a creature for shows and ceremonials only,

354 WINTER INDIA

the railway and the automobile displacing it as a
means of travel, and American overhead machinery
crowding it out of timber-yards; and the Delhi
durbar of 1903 very probably the last great parade
of state elephants.

All the way out from the city the road had been
streaming with people in brilliant clothes and the
kaleidoscopic street crowds of Jeypore continued
far into the country. Troops of Rajputs in green,
white, and yellow clothes, on foot, in bullock-carts,
sitting by the roadside, and going in and out of tem-
ples, enlivened the way, and, as we mounted the side
of the mesa, we could see this brilliant ribbon of road
stretching away through the level of the abandoned
city of Amber. The lurching elephant gave us
momently finer and wider views out over the plain
of ruins, and finally lumbered into a court of the
fortress palace and knelt for us thankfully to dis-
mount. In the little temple to Kali, at the palace
entrance, the floor was still red with the blood of
the goat just sacrificed, and we had heathendom
fresh and hot there at the maharaja's door. Guide-
books and sentimental tourists have said so much in
praise of Amber that we had keyed our expectations
too high. Also, one must land at Bombay and see
Amber before seeing Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Delhi,
and the rest to value it so highly. The tinsel look-
ing-glasses and plaster rooms at Amber were weari-
some. We had seen too many before. The pavilions,
the baths, and the gardens seemed small and con-
tracted, and even the pomegranate-trees grew in pots.
Best of all in the palace was the high balcony, where

JEYPORE 355

we enjoyed a picnic tiffin and a view out over the
lake and the plain of ruins and tombs. The elephant
took us slowly down hill with the greatest possible
discomfort, the mahout goading it until drops of
blood stood on its neck, and we rejoiced that there
was no more elephant-riding in prospect that season.
We were delighted to get back to the fantastic,
pink-plaster streets of Jeypore and join in its the-
atrical pageantry, throw wheat to the pigeons in air,
join arrested wedding processions, and watch the
sedate old dancers in brogans tramp their slow
measures and sing their nasal song-s. The street
juggler looped the torpid python around his body
and held the head before him to be photographed,
as if the coiling creature were only a garden-hose
with fangs in the nozle. The streets fairly blazed
with color in the last red and yellow rays of sunset ;
brilliant turbans and head-sheets were moving lan-
guidly in every direction around the four-corners'
fountain; pigeons whirled in clouds and trotted be-
side us by hundreds; flocks of noisy crows flew to
settle for the night in trees just outside the city wall ;
and when we reluctantly drove away the frost-haze
was silvered by moonlight, and Jeypore remains a
brilliant picture — too spectacular and color-satisfy-
ing to be real, too good to be true, a certain feeling
possessing one that the scenery was rolled up that
night and the troupe went home or on to the next
town. In the cold hotel we slowly congealed, enthu-
siasm declined, and we joyfully quoted Lord Cur-
zon's opinion: "The rose-red city over which Sir
Edwin Arnold has poured the copious cataract of a

19

356 WINTER INDIA

truly Telegraphese vocabulary, struck me when I
was in India as a pretentious plaster fraud." In
memory one reverts to Sir Edwin Arnold's view,
sees only the fantastic pink palace fronts, the bril-
liant turbans, the wedding processions, and the jew-
eled women switching their red and yellow skirts in
the sunshine ; and of all places in India, I should like
best to be put down for an hour in the streets of
Jeypore, when the midwinter sun is shining, the
opium-market is lively, and the astrologers have
declared it a propitious day for weddings.

CHAPTER XXVI

MOUNT ABU AND AIIMEDABAD

^E were jolted from midnight until the
next noon, to cover the two hundred
and seventy-four miles of railway be-
tween Jeypore and Abu Roads, our
bearer standing in his crowded car for
all but three hours of that time. At Abu Roads
we met again the long-tongued Anglo-Indian "jinny
rickshaw." There were six coolies to each cart;
two leaned against the cross-beam of the ridicu-
lously long tongue as they slowly walked; two
more leaned against the back of the vehicle; and
the two reliefs rested as they lounged along the flat
country road ; all six dragging their clumsy slioes in
the dust and enveloping us in a cloud for the six
miles of level carriage-road. Running was not in
their thoughts as, with frequent rests, they slowly
crossed the plain and, at a snail's pace, crawled up
the easy grades of the mountain road. Even ox-
teams overtook us. We passed only the wretched
hovels of the people, mere pig-sties of bamboo and
mud beneath bamboo-trees, each with its banana-
patch, and our shouting coolies made all who came
to the doors to stare, kneel and salute us. We rested

357

358 WINTER INDIA

once by a tragic black pool shaded by two enormous
banian-trees, where Scotch whisky and soda was in-
sistently offered us by a black keeper of a refresh-
ment booth. The temple domes on the mountain-top
showed in sky-line ; the golden plain shimmered far
below US; and in six and a half hours we accom-
plished the sixteen miles. We dragged along beside
a lake in the late sunset as bullock-carts filled with
rosy English children came from a picnic. There
were rice-fields on the mountain top, flooded by
primitive Persian water-wheels, wonderfully green
and thriving crops, and groups of palms in every
vista. Violets bloomed by the dak bangla's door-
steps, where a fine old Idiansamah greeted us and
gave us tea with Goanese guava jelly on crisp toast
in a warm room.

Mount Abu is the headquarters of the resident
who rules the seventeen Rajput principalities, and
from him we secured a permit to visit the Jain tem-
ples. The Jains are the last of the Buddhists left
in India and their creed is still closely akin to that
Gautama devised for his people, although their ob-
servance of caste is contrary to the fundamental
principle of Buddhism. A Rajput officer in Euro-
pean coat, draped dhotee, and a sword as his badge
of race and rank, with a red-coated chuprassy
from the Residency, escorted us the next morning
the two miles to the Dilwarra shrines. The guard
at the temple gate hurriedly wound himself into
his kamarband, set his turban straight, and, shoul-
dering his carbine, paced the flags energetically
while we waited for the permits to be examined.

MOUNT ABU AND AHMEDABAD 361

Another red coat and yellow turban came, and the
three guided us around the two Jain temples, which
are the most elaborately carved and decorated
shrines in India. They were built in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, and the marble was brought
from quarries twelve miles away and carved to f rost-
and lace-like fineness.

Marble cloisters whose alcove chapels contain
seated images of the tirthankars, or Jain saints, sur-
round an inner court holding the elaborately con-
structed and decorated central shrine and altar.
One marvels as much at the perfect preservation
as at the minute, lavish ornamentation; and for
the preservation the Rajputs have to thank the Eng-
lish. In the central domical halls of both temples
the columns, arches, struts, trusses, beams, central
panels, and altar-fronts are covered with myriads of
tiny figures and bands of conventional ornament in
full and low relief, a marble filigree-work surpass-
ing anything to be seen elsewhere. Scenes from the
lives of the saints frame the niches holding their
images; v/onderful rosettes and pendentives enrich
the ceilings; and saints by the meter band the col-
umns and walls until one feels hypnotized by the
myriad repetitions. Leaf forms suggest the Greek
acanthus, while the Buddhist swastika, elephant, lo-
tus, and Hansa goose appear, and a whole grammar
of Indian ornament can be traced in those halls,
where the white saints sit absorbed in eternal medi-
tation. At the first temple fifty-five saints sit in
as many cells around the court, and a coolie was
dusting the images as indifferently as if they were

362 WINTER INDIA

but common furniture, flicking at them with a doubt-
ful rag, and whacking them again in a way to make
one wonder what a European could do to shock re-
ligious sentiment and make the Jains hedge a visitor 's
entrance with permits and guards. It is expressly
enjoined that Europeans shall remove their hats and
not step on the platforms of the shrines or within
the image-cells.

The second temple is the older one and simpler in
some respects ; but the pillared hall of the main
shrine is loftier, its serpentine brackets and struts
even more lavishly ornamented, its dome and pen-
dentives more exquisite. We went back and won-
dered again at all the extravagance of carving in
the first temple. Certainly these two Jain shrines
are the climax of Indian decoration and ornamental
construction, miracles and masterpieces of patient
art.

The night on the frosty mountain top aggravated
colds dating back to the wet felt slippers at Amrit-
sar temple, and it was a delight to get down to
Abu Roads and the dry, hot plain again. The sta-
tion-master let us go at once to the waiting car
that was attached to the train in the middle of the
night. The down mail jolted us into Ahmedabad
before daylight, where another kind station-master
let us remain in the shunted car until breakfast-time.
At the end of the station platform an ornamental
minaret rose above the trees, first harbinger of the
day of architectural feasts. Had Ahmedabad not
been one of the exceptionally unique and interesting
cities of India, I could not have maintained enthu-

MOUNT ABU AND AUMEDABAD 363

siasm to explore its mosques while burning with the
fever of influenza. The air was soft and warm as
late spring in the earliest morning, and the sun had
a desert scorch at noon at that end of February.
By dreary lanes and ruined gates in broken walls, we
reached the beautiful mosques whose carved sand-
stone columns and walls recall those of Fatehpur
Sikri. Rani Sipri's mosque, the Queen's mosque,
the tombs of Mohammed Chisti and Muhafiz Khan
each seemed the perfection of beauty in line and
carved ornament, the minarets, arches, and walls cov-
ered with such a wealth of arabesques and traceries
as vied wdth the white wonders on Mount Abu. At
the Queen's mosque a band of Moslems bore in a
sheeted figure bound to a charpoy covered with a
rich cloth and garlands of marigolds. All the
mourners bathed at the tank, united in standing
prayer, lifted the charpoy, and bore it off to the
graveyard.

We drove into a dreary, rubbish-strewn common,
and, through a breach in an old wall, reached the
court behind Sidi Said's desecrated mosque of the
palace to look from the outside upon the two famous
tracery windows, best known and most beautiful
work of that kind in India. Nothing in marble tra-
ceries elsewhere approaches them. We drove to
Hathi Singh's Jain temple, whose saints in niches
and elaborately carved ornament in white marble
are in the style of the Mount Abu shrines, and then
we went to see the great tanks and green wells sur-
rounded by marble galleries, where luxury-loving
rulers sought coolness during the great heat.

364 WINTER INDIA

The streets of Alunedabad are dazzling and ka-
leidoscopic to one beginning his India at Bombay;
but Ahmedabad, once ''the handsomest town in
Hindustan, perhaps in all the world," is a dull
second after Jeypore. There were new models in
turbans to be seen, and the picturesque pigeon-cotes
erected by humane Jains are other novelties peculiar
to this one city; for the Jains observe the strictest
Buddhist tenets against destroying life, provide
refuges and hospitals for animals, strain all the
water they use, and step aside to spare the lowliest
insect.

The vegetable, brass, and pottery bazaars, strung
down the middle of a wide street, were centers of life
and uproar; but the local guide bore us off to the
Avorkshop of a carpet-weaver,— poor show after Am-
ritsar, Lahore, and Agra's factories,— and to the
gate of the chief wood-carver who executes American
orders for interior decorations. There was holiday
or bankruptcy on for that day, but much search-
ing and pounding on mute doors at last produced
a lank Moslem with a key, who opened a great room
containing a table, a book of designs, and four carved
chairs, tagged with price-marks five times those of
the Lahore Art School. We searched the brass ba-
zaars and all the brass-shops for the pierced screens
that a winter-touring M. P. lauds as a local specialty.
In clouds of warm dust we drove here and there,
hunting the famous kincob-shops, walking through
archways to alleys and ill-smelling courts and cul-
de-sacs, where small dealers had bundles of creased
samples of tawdry, wall-papery brocades. Others

MOUNT ABU AND AHMEDABAD 367

shook squares of tinsel ly stuffs from upper windows,
and shouted, "Fifteen rupees!" for each damaged
remnant. The smells of those byways were invita-
tion to and promise of any pestilence, and in one
damp, fetid corner that we retreated from abruptly
even the glib guide seemed to smell a thing or two.
* ' Phew ! the drains ! the drains ! What a very bad
municipal!" and we never wondered that the native
states show such a great decrease of population dur-
ing the last five years of the century, while the
bubonic plague raged.

At the busy clothes bazaar, tinsel caps and orange
jackets for little boys were the bargains of the day
that crowds were competing for, and more and more
peddlers were opening rainbow packs and preparing
for an evening bazaar. We had done our duty by
the sights and shows of Ahmedabad ; we had had our
fill of local color and smells ; and we drove back to
rest at the comfortable station. Our guide and the
bearer were bewildered, and the latter tearful at
our wasting two hours on foot in the bazaar, and
losing that much time in the use of the horses taken
at so much for all day. ' ' But, memsahib, ' ' he whim-
pered, ''if you pay six rupees a day for a carriage,
you must use all day. You must see all. There are
many nice tombs yet. You must see more. You
must not stop now. These horses just stand around,
while you walk two hours, and now you stop for
tea, and no more use. It is too expenseful. "

When the Bombay mail rumbled in, we found our
reserved compartment, spread our razais, and lay
down, and all at once had a strange, dizzy, floating

368 WINTER INDIA

sensation, as if hypnotized or drugged. The train
was moving, but without jar, jolt, or thumps. The
carriage rolled smoothly, as if on springs, and we
sat up and stared out and at each other to fathom
the mystery. At last, on our seventeenth night, and
after many days spent on Indian railway trains, we
had met the mythical "bogie-car"! The car-spring
was a reality.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE CAVES OP ELLORA AND KARLI

iE touched the Western world at Bom-
bay only for a day, and quickly took
train again, spreading our razais for
an all-night ride of one hundred and
seventy-eight miles to Nandgaon. No
bogie-car, no sort of spring or buffer, softened
the thumps of the hard-cushioned couches, and the
occupant of the upper berth, feeling a draft when
she had climbed to her swinging shelf, unhooded
the lamp and found that the side wall of the car
consisted of wire netting only in its upper portion.
Her bedding was removed to the floor, and as there
was no way to check this generous ventilation, chill
drafts swept the compartment as the train ran
through damp fields and dark spaces, and the dust
of the road-bed covered us an inch deep by morning.
The feeble lamp flickered out soon after midnight,
and it took vigorous shouting at two dark stations
before we could get the station-master and his note-
book to investigate, report, and reilluminate with a
broken-down lamp that went out as soon as we left
his station. As everywhere in India, there were
steaming tea-kettles on the platforms and cups of tea

360

370 WINTER INDIA

at one's window at every halt; and we thawed and
packed in the darkness in time to dismount at Nand-
gaon at six o'clock. More tea, with some toast and
bananas, constituted breakfast, and we got away in
two small tongas, each with a pair of tiny, galloping
ponies. It was not the tonga of the Simla road, but
the original native vehicle which has lent its name to
everything on wheels. "The tonga is a low, two-
wheeled, dachshund of a cart, with the build of a
gun-carriage," is Steevens's happy description of it.
The road led across an uninteresting, level, unfenced,
dry plain, with detached hills showing on the hori-
zon. We stopped every seven miles to change ponies,
and we changed tongas, visited back and forth from
one cart to the other, rode backward as the passen-
ger is supposed to ride, sat on the front seat with the
driver, and did everything to beguile the tedium and
discomfort of that all-day ride of fifty-six miles.
The sun grew warmer, and it was almost hot at noon,
the country more and more uninteresting, with few
villages, few travelers, and no incidents to distract
us after an indifferent tiffin at a way-station. At
three in the afternoon, we reached the foot of the
ghat in whose perpendicular face the great cave-
temples have been excavated. The rock-cut temples
at Mahabalipur had been but preparation for the
great series of caves at Ellora, where the face of a
steep hillside has been burrowed into, great cham-
bers hollowed out, and porticoes, galleries, staircases,
and passages cut in the solid rock and covered with
splendid bas-relief sculpture on the most elaborate
scale. The line of rock-temples extends for a mile

UOCK-CUT TEill'Li;. .\ 1' KI.LOllA.

THE OAVES OF ELLORA AND KARLI 373

and a quarter along the front of the clift*, Buddhists,
Jains, and Brahmaus having in turn cut their
shrines in the everlasting hills, accomplishing this
stupendous work in the sixth, eighth, and later cen-
turies. For more than two hours we rambled along
the face of the cliifs, in and out, up and down the
different stages and galleries of the thirty-four rock-
cut shrines ; and, fatigued as we were, hastened with
breathless interest from one to another of the many
surprises.

All that we had seen of roek-sculptures and mono-
lith temples elsewhere paled before this great dis-
play, and all the monuments of patient toil and in-
finite labor in the world seemed nothing compared
to the Kailas at Ellora. First, the great sunken
court, measuring one hundred and fifty-four by two
hundred and seventy-six feet, was hewn out of the
solid trap-rock of the hillside, leaving the rock mass
of the temple wholly detached in a cloistered court
like a colossal boulder, save as a rock bridge once
connected the upper story of the temple with the
upper row of galleried chambers surrounding three
sides of the court. One enters from the plain by
an ornamental gateway in the cliff front, a rock
screen closing the front of the court. Colossal ele-
phants and lamp-posts stand on either side of the
open mandapam, or pavilion, containing the sacred
bull; and beyond rises the monolithic Dravidian
temple to Shiva, ninety feet in height, hollowed into
vestibule, chamber, and image-cells, all lavishly
carved. Time and earthquakes have weathered and
broken away bits of the great monument, and Mos-

374 WINTER INDIA

lem zealots strove to destroy the carved figures, but
one hardly notes these defects in presence of this
greatest wonder of the Indian world, absolutely
unique among architectural monuments. Patches
of ocher and shreds of flower garlands remained
from the last festival, the only suggestion of human
touch or occupancy. One seemed to feel the pres-
ence of magic forces there, as if the Kailas had been
turned to stone by some enchantment. It dazed one
to consider that one mind could have conceived such
a stupendous monument as this ex-voto of an
eighth-century raja — his material expression of grat-
itude at his restoration to health by the neighboring
springs.

The three-story Brahmanical temples were the next
most amazing spectacle : gallery over gallery hewn
in the cliff front and connected by curious arched
passages and tunnels of later date, as in the Do
Tal (two-story) and the Tin Tal (three-story) tem-
ples. The Das Avatar's main hall is cut one hun-
dred and forty-three feet into the rock, forty-six
massive pillars connecting the roof and floor. One
Buddhist cave with a double gallery in the screen
front, and an upper window opening to the plain,
has a ribbed roof, and from so closely following the
lines of the early chaitya halls of wooden construc-
tion, it is known as the Carpenter's Cave, There is a
carved dagoba in the apse of its long hall, where the
seated figure of Buddha and attendant figures in
air are in the spirit of the best period of Buddhist
art. There are storied viharas or monasteries near
it, which, like this great chaitya, follow closely the

THE CAVES OF ELLUKA AND KARLI 375

forms of wooden construction. The Dehwarra, ad-
joining the Carpenter's Cave, measures one hun-
dred and ten by seventy feet, two rows of massive
rock pillars joining- the floor and roof. In the Jain
caves beyond, cross-legged tirthankars sit in medi-
tation in carved cells, archaic prototypes of the fairy
marble alcoves on Mount Abu.

Sated with wonders, we were carried up the steep
hill to the Nizam's dak bangla, where brass bed-
steads with wire springs and double hair mattresses
were as great a surprise as the architectural won-
ders that had stunned us. With great considera-
tion, we omitted from the khansamah's menu all
dishes requiring long preparation, in order that we
might dine as soon as possible and go to those mat-
tresses the earlier. At the end of two hours of call-
ing and waiting on the ''Very well, madam," we
crossed the dark lawn to the cook-house door to
make a final demand for food of some kind. White
figures and turbans flitted about in the lighted in-
terior, making an admirable picture within the frame
of the door, and we stood in darkness, silently appre-
ciating it, and wondering if it would be attainable by
kodak in daylight. We saw the cook strain the soup
into the tureen through the end of the dish-cloth
he had used and flung on his arm while we watched,
and then we cried aloud. Cook, khansamah, and
bearer all leaped aside, soup and dish-rag dropped
to the floor, and they retreated to far corners
of the cook-house mumbling and wailing: "Oh,
memsahib! Please, memsahib!" etc. I had long
revolted at the taste and smell of the ordinary

376 WINTER INDIA

gray soup served everywhere, and reckless flights of
the imagination in trying to describe the flavoring
were borne out by that scene. A very meek and
deprecatory khansamah served that dinner of plain
chops and potatoes with the inevitable cauliflower,
cringing as he offered any dish, backing away
quickly at each sound, and keeping one eye fear-
fully turned upon us and the door of escape as he
moved about.

Early the next morning we returned to the tem-
ples, climbed the steps, and passed through the rock
screen or gateway of the Kailas, fearing lest it
be a dream of the night. We sought vainly for some
vantage-point in the contracted court where a camera
could cover the whole mass of the Kailas. From
the galleried chambers surrounding the court we
saw the central temple best, and by a pitch-dark
stairway we happened into an upper chamber where
the finest bas-reliefs at Ellora covered the walls, and
the ornamental capitals of the columns were pierced
and chiseled out in the free and bold designs of
a wood-carver. Even there the hand of Alamgir
and his fanatics had fallen, and the tiny figures and
the ornaments were defaced. The caves are still
places of pilgrimage, and at the great festivals of
Shiva crowds troop through the Kailas, and the im-
ages are smeared with ocher and hung with garlands.
The tread of these thousands of bare feet for cen-
turies has given that peculiar, greasy polish to the
stone floors that no other treatment bestows. In the
rainy season, waterfalls stream over the front of the
cliff, the courts and halls are flooded, and the path

THE CAVES OF ELLORA AND KAI4L1 377

that runs along the cliff from cave to cave is a moat
defending the temples from the plain.

It was an ideally fresh and fragrant morning when
we started down from the grassy plateau to the
plain, but it grew hot as the tongas bumped along the
tedious way. As we reached a more cultivated stretch
of country, sago- and cocoa-palms rustled their
dusty fronds in the rising breeze that soon brought
with it a rain-cloud and a cold mist that pierced to
the marrow. The rain came in blinding sheets,
swept through the tongas, and for two hours trickled
down on us and our rolls of bedding. We arrived
at the station in time to be partially dried over pans
of charcoal as we ate a hurried dinner. The train
rumbled in toward nine o'clock, and we rode as far
as Kalyan, where we waited from four to seven
o'clock, when the Poona train picked us up. We had
the first new car we had seen, a shining, highly var-
nished contrast to the ancient, unswept, unwashed
cars in which we had been jolted over India. Pea-
cock-blue glass in the windows gave an unearthly
look to the red, scorched landscapes we rode through
in ascending the Bhor Ghat. By twenty-one tun-
nels and many loops and zigzags we rose two thou-
sand feet in seventeen miles, the train halting at sev-
eral reversing stations, where the engine switched
past to join the other end of the train. We had
eagle views out and down to rocky caiions as bare,
dry, and roughly sculptured by the elements as any
in our arid regions of the Southwest, even the famil-
iar cactus of Arizona deserts flourishing in the
wastes of rock and sand.

20

378 WINTER INDIA

From Lonauli station a very trim dog-cart car-
ried us through a model settlement toward the open
fields. Our guide to the caves of Karli was Dhoond
Dhu, a cheerful little barelegged turban of thirteen,
who spoke good English with the chirpy voice of a
young robin, and made every point tell by the ap-
peal of his deep, dark eyes. He fought valiantly to
make a good bargain for us with the chair-bearers
at work in a cactus-strewn field, when the cart had
stopped at the end of wheel tracks in a plowed
ground. They were decrepit chairs with makeshift
poles tied to them — carrying-chairs only, as one de-
crepit leg and then another fell out if one attempted
to sit in them while they rested on the ground. The
path led steeply along the side of a hill that became
a precipice in places, the chairs creaking and mo-
mently threatening collapse. We remembered our bo-
gus Nawab at Jeyporewhen three fraudulent priests
assumed to do the honors of the great Buddhist cave
at Karli. Blackened columns and a lofty entrance
recessed in the rock are an imposing preparation for
the great chaitya hall, a chamber one hundred and
twenty-four feet long, forty-two feet wide, and
forty-six feet high. A row of ornamental columns
rises on either side to the ribbed teak roof, and at
the far end, in the nave, a massive dagoba, despoiled
of its bas-reliefs, images, and ornaments, is claimed
as their sacred emblem by the Shivaites who have
so long held the place. Dating from the beginning
of the Christian era or earlier, this cave shows the
first and purest form of Buddhist temples, and is
the largest and finest cave-temple of its kind in India.

THE CAVES OF ELLORA AND KARLI 381

Steps lead to adjoining viharas, three-story caves
where the square cells with sculptured walls allowed
room only for the stone shelf or string-bed of the
anchorite.

Workmen dawdled with pick and crowbar, clear-
ing away rubbish at the entrance, and the dis-
comfited priests lounged there, chatting, when we
came back from the viharas. Black rain-clouds were
rolling up, and we started down the rocky path,
leaving Dhoond Dhu to stir up and drive the chair-
coolies. Then a great cry arose as priests, workmen,
and coolies ran howling : * ' Prissint ! Prissint ! Mem-
sahib!" rubbing their itching palms across their
faces and extending them beseechingly. They
shoved one another aside, wrangled fiercely, and
seemed ready to do violence to the small guide. It
was not the place in which to have an argument with
even one bad man, and the dozen big beggars could
easily have pitched us over the precipice, or shut
us up in farther caves, without killing, until we
were ready to pay ransom. But one has such con-
tempt for the Hindu that fear or the possibility
of danger never suggested itself until we were well
away and thought what that number of Afghans or
Macedonians might have done. To stop the clatter
and warn off the bogus priest who had snatched
Dhoond Dhu roughly by the shoulder, I lifted my
umbrella and took but one step forward, when the
pack ran back to the cave entrance, and the chair-
coolies threw themselves flat and crawled to their
poles, imploring mercy. We had to lean against the
rock wall while we laughed at the farcical denoue-

382 WINTER INDIA

ment, Dhoond Dhu shaking the last turban fold loose
with his child-like spasms of glee.

On reaching Lonauli early in the afternoon, we
had asked the station-master to have a compartment
reserved on the midnight train to Bombay. "Cer-
tingly, memsahib, certingly. I will wire to Poona."
At six o'clock we had no answer— because no wire
had been sent. At seven the condition contin-
ued, the station-master was still absent, and the
assistant would not send a telegram "because there
iss no rule for thatt." We sent a telegram and
asked the assistant to sell us the tickets then, that
we might sleep in the waiting-room until the train
came at five minutes after midnight. *'No, no,"
said the babu ; ''the 12:05 iss one of to-morrow's
trains. I cannot sell you ticket now and mix my
accounts for two daj^s so terribly. I should lose some
money, and I am poor man."

It was a hot, close night, and the scorching air
came in waves from the bare cliffs of the Bhor Ghat
as the train curved and reversed and crept from one
twinkling light and group of lights to another down
the two thousand feet to the plain. With our ar-
rival at Bombay at six in the morning, we had spent
our twentieth night on Indian railway trains in
three months of travel, in that first winter; and
gladly we bade farewell to the red razais.

CHAPTER XXVIII

BOMBAY

FTER two months '' up-country, " Bom-
bay seemed a European city, a West-
ern metropolis; and that hotel which
strikes such dismay and disgust to the
heart of the tourist coming from Eu-
rope seemed to us a very palace of comfort; that
hotel whose corridors are strewn with servants and
their rolls of bedding, their pots, pipes, and traps, —
servants who gabble and smoke, eat and sleep,
dress and undress, each before his employer's door,
as unconcernedly as in their own serais; that hotel
of hard and hillocky beds, which all one's winter ac-
cumulation of razais cannot soften ; that hotel whose
partition walls stop two feet from the ceiling, where
every room has an outer balcony and an inner
dark bath-room whose primitive plumbing puts the
American in fear for his life. By contrast with
up-country hotels it was the home of comfort, and
at last we understood how people could talk of the
*' luxury of Indian travel." All things are com-
parative, and one's ideas of splendor depend on what
has gone before. Even the Madras and Calcutta
hotels would have seemed splendid after a round
of inns and banglas.

-1 383

384 WINTER INDLA.

The soft, sea air, the warm days and mild nights
were balm to us, after the dry scorch and frostbites
up-country. The sight of Gothic architecture was
a revelation after having reached the edge of satiety
among Hindu, Jain, Mogul, Pathan, and Dravidian
masterpieces. Street-cars, European shop-windows
and houses were objects of interest; and to drive
over sprinkled roads beside the soft-sounding sea,
where bands played and fashion walked; to drink
tea on club-house porches, — all this was too exciting.

We were invited to a Parsi wedding on our first
day, and drove across the native city, around the
curve of the Back Bay, and up the slopes of Mala-
bar Hill to the villa of the bride's family. A pro-
cession of Parsi ladies, wrapped in saris of delicate
silks, and preceded by a band, entered the gates be-
fore us and joined the group of Parsi women in gold-
bordered saris who made the drawing-room blaze
with their jewels. The bride was quiet and sub-
dued, the groom self-possessed to the point of flip-
pancy when he came in from the assemblage of
Parsi men in the garden, all attired in white cere-
monial dress and queer black hats. Bands played,
and the ceremony by the priest was very long and
full of symbolism. The bride, at one point, held
a cocoanut and clasped the hand of the groom, while
the priest delivered a long exhortation and showered
them with rice, fruit, and flowers. The bride was
invested with the jeweled necklaces and other gifts
of the groom, sprinkled with rose-water, and touched
with attar of roses in the strangely mixed Parsi and
Hindu ceremony that has come about during the

BOMBAY 385

long residence of the fire-worshiping Parsis in In-
dia. The conventional menu of a London wedding
breakfast, with champagne and ices, was served to the
company of Anglo-Indian officials, foreign consuls
and merchants, a Portuguese bishop, and some Jap-
anese naval officers and American visitors. The
Parsi ladies and children were served in the large
marquees on the lawn, where ceremonial dishes were
added to the foreign dainties. Each had a palm-
leaf for a plate, and a vegetarian repast was par-
taken of without knives or forks. Each visitor was
garlanded with tuberoses and sprinkled with rose-
water when he left, but the gilded pan, or betel-nut
part of Hindu ceremony, was omitted.

A few days later we attended a second Parsi wed-
ding, where still more of the old ceremonial was
observed. There was the same garden company of
men in white ceremonial dress, and a drawing-room
full of Parsi ladies covered with jewels and draped
in silks of every delicate color. The bride seemed
not to like the way in which her veil was pulled and
rumpled by clumsy hands, and sweetifieats thrust
in her mouth, and with some emphasis unwound her
sari herself and wrapped around her the silver-
bordered one given by the groom's mother. The
bride and groom sat in chairs facing each other,
and the priest wound around and bound them to-
gether with the symbolical white cord, and then
bound them further with the groom's kamarband.
A veil was held between them at the next stage, and
finally they ate rice from the same dish, the groom
feeding the bride with his fingers. There was a

386 WINTER INDIA

pantomime of her washing the groom's feet with
milk, and his purse was given the bride, that she
might spend it on a feast for the poor. The ceremony-
was full of meaning and deep significance to the
beautiful, dark-eyed Parsi women and to the serious,
priestly looking men, but it would take many pages
to convey the full meaning of the customs brought
from Persia so many centuries ago.

There were stock sights to be seen in Bombay,
and we took the red Murray book and did them ;
but it was not exciting after the up-country sights
and people. First, to the twin Towers of Silence,
with the friezes of living vultures on their cornices,
where the Parsis, who do not believe in defiling the
earth, expose the bodies of their dead to the elements
and the birds of the air. Nothing could be more
gruesome and repellent than the rows of huge, mo-
tionless birds awaiting their prey. There were chill,
sepulchral halls where ceremonies are held by the
mourners, and from the parapet of the high garden
one has a fine view down over the Back Bay and the
city, and across the harbor to the mainland shores.

In all the many accounts I have read of these
Towers of Silence, the narrators always looked down
the winding road and saw a procession of white-
clad mourners approaching with a body, and grue-
somely told how the vultures saw it too, and flapped
their wings. "We looked and looked in vain, the
first travelers to miss that regulation spectacle.
AVhen we boasted our exemption to a resident of
Bombay, he said wearily: "But of course you will
go home and say you saw a funeral winding up.

BOMBAY 389

They all do. Four travelers whom I had taken
there have published minute and thrilling accounts
of how the procession wound up and up, and how
the vultures flapped their wings, although I had seen
nothing of the kind."

Guide-book in hand, and Sir Edwin Arnold's
caves of Elephanta fresh in mind, we rose with the
dawn one morning and sped away by steam-launch
across the harbor to the cave-temples of Shiva that
date before the twelfth century. We landed at
a pier of detached concrete blocks, and made our
way by leaps to land, where the old sergeant who
guards the place described every temple, every bas-
relief, every group and image, so minutely that we
ought never to forget a detail of those rock-sculp-
tures, many of them of such beauty that we echoed
the sergeant's anger at the Portuguese for firing
cannon into the caves to destroy the idolatrous work.
We tiptoed here and there, kept away from the
darker corners, looked suspiciously at every rock and
bush and tuft of grass, remembering Sir Edwin
Arnold's tales of the deadly cobras on Elephanta;
but the sergeant insisted that there were no snakes,
that he had never seen one. It only remained for
him to tell us, as he did, that he never had fever, for
our last illusion to vanish. If we were not to be
bitten by cobras and filled with fever germs by
visiting Elephanta, what more was it than a plea-
sure excursion and boating picnic? What glory in
daring it ? What credit for anything more than one
morning's hire of a steam-launch? We did the mu-
seum, the art school, the hospital for animals, the

390 WINTER INDIA

markets, and the serais where Mohammedan pilgrims
stop on their way to and from Mecca. At the large
serai we met the three tuneful Bokhara beggars we
had seen in the serai at Amritsar. They were still
red-cheeked and cheerful, still wrapped in their
north-country wadded clothes on that warm morn-
ing, and they showed proudly their Cook coupon
ticket for the pilgrim-ship and further journey to
Mecca. For the rest, Bombay was a European city ;
the hotel life, the teas, the drives, all of the West
only. It was hardly India to us, save as Delhi Jew-
elers salaamed in recognition and sang to us be-
seechingly: "Please buy my niklass. Please take
that griddle."

We had but a few days to wait for the ship to
Ismailia,— hot days, when the thermometer stood at
90° for hours; a haze hung over the ocean, and the
evening drives to the Breach of Kandy and Malabar
Hill were none too refreshing. All Bombay turned
out of doors at sunset, to drive, to walk at the edge
of the ocean, to linger by the band-stands long af-
ter dark. The groups of white-clad Mohammedans
gathered together to pray and to listen to the Koran,
and the groups of Parsis playing cards by elec-
tric light as they sat on the grass by the Queen's
statue, were the sharpest pictures in memory after
Bombay and the mainland hills had faded on the
horizon, and one turned gratefully toward lands
where it is not always afternoon,

"Did you enjoy India?" my friends continued to
ask me, with unhappy choice of words; and, to be
literal, the answer could only be negative.

BOMBAY 391

"What impressed you most?" To that it was
easy to answer : "What England has done for India ;
the incalculable debt all that continent of diverse
peoples owes for the just, intelligent, humane rule
of the Great White Queen and her son ; for the trea-
sure of noble lives poured into the peninsula for a
century, for the burdens the white man has borne."
If all the people should gather daily, like the mul-
titudes praying on the Ganges bank at Benares,
salaam toward England, and chant their acknowledg-
ments, it would be fitting; but one discovers an
ingratitude of dependencies degrees blacker than
that of republics.

INDEX

INDEX

Abu, Mount, 358, 361, 362, Auckland, Lord, 98, 192, 217

375 Audience-halls, 194, 195, 216,

Abu Koads, 357, 362 328, 351

Afghanistan, 279, 280, 281, Aurangzeb, 195

284 Austin de Bordeaux, 194
Afghans, 259, 260, 262, 280,

296 Bahadur Shah, 228

Afridi, 277, 281, 282, 283, Bandy, 35, 40

286 Banian-tree, 12, 98

Agra, 182, 185-201, 210, 333, Bazaars, 166, 181, 244, 247,

342, 343 248, 250, 261, 263, 304, 305,

Ahmedabad, 362-367 347, 364

Akbar, 194, 202, 203, 204, 206, Beecher, Henry Ward, 278

212, 218, 227, 228, 229, 230, Beggars, 250, 253, 267, 304,

243, 255, 258, 260, 299, 341 381, 390

AU Masjid, 261, 292, 293 Benares, 150-176

Allahabad Pioneer, 94 Bengali, 101, 102

Altamsh, 234 Bhattiprolu, 80, 120

Alwar, 323-333 Bhor Ghat, 377, 382

Ambala, 313, 321 Bichauna, 239

Amber, 344, 353, 354 Blavatsky, Mme., 81, 320

Amraoti, 99, 141 Bodhi-druma, 116, 273

Amritsar, 298-311 Bogie-car, 368

Ananda, 119 Bokhara, 253, 265, 271, 285,

Acarkali, 243 304, 390

Annanbag Gardens, 167, 168 Bombay, 369, 383-390

Arizona, 377 Bo-tree, 116, 118, 119, 120,

Arjuna, 75 129, 133-142, 273

Armor, 80, 329 Brahman, 16, 24, 29, 42, 45,

Arnold, Sir Edwin, 355, 356, 48, 49, 129, 154, 155, 167,

389 352

Art industries, 166, 221, 242, Brahm-Gaya, 125, 134

347, 364 Brasses, 166

Art schools, 242, 347, 364 Bright, John, 32

Aryan, 260 Brooks, Phillips, 69

Ash picking, 8, 9 Bucephalus, 282

Asoka, 116, 120, 136, 137, 138, Buckingham Canal, 69, 70

141, 142, 227 Buddha, 74, 80, 90, 100, 116-

Attock, 258, 260, 295 120, 163, 168, 227, 358, 374

395

396 INDEX

Buddha-Gaya, 126, 129-147, Dancers, 59, 60, 61, 235, 236,

273 237, 348, 352, 355

Buddhism, esoteric, 320 Daniel, Samuel, 22, 23, 29, 34,

Budgery boats, 69, 75 47, 48

Burma, 89, 90, 139, 140, 141, Darjiling, 105, 109, 110, 317,

145, 146, 147 318

Delhi, 213-226

Cable, George W,, 241 Diamond Throne, the, 136

Calcutta, 86-101 Dilke, Sir Charles, 193, 280

Camels, 221, 228, 273, 279, Dilwarra temples, 358, 361,

281, 289, 293, 294, 306 362

Caravans, 272, 279, 293, 295 Dindigal, 21, 22

Carpenter's Cave, 374, 375 Diver, submarine, 85

Carpets, 193, 307, 309, 310, Dogs, railway rules for, 257

330, 343 Dravidian architecture, 15, 24,

Caste, 103 31, 42, 373

Caste-marks, 10, 16, 31, 45, Drawing-room, the Viceregal,

107, 145, 150 97

Cats, Persian, 268 Durbar, 225, 226, 228
Caves, 76, 132, 370, 373, 374,

378, 381, 389 Edward VII, King, 226

Cawnpore, 181, 182 Edwards, Sir H., 263, 283

Chandni Chauk, 215, 228, 244, Elephanta, caves of, 389

263 Elephants, 17, 18, 24, 33, 90,

Chaturgam Lai, 150, 156, 171, 328, 330, 336, 339, 340, 341,

172 342, 344, 352, 353, 354, 355

Cheroots, 22 EUenborough, Lord, 192

Chetah, 330 Ellora, 370, 373, 374, 375

Chidambram, 34-63 Elphinstone, General, 283

Chota Hazri, 11 Enfield rifle, 280

Christmas, 75, 89 Everest, Mount, 111, 112, 113
Cingalese texts, 120, 123

Conjeveram, 64 Fahien, 132, 139, 164, 273

Connaught, Duke of, 345 Fakirs, 157, 158, 166

Cormorin, Cape, 260 Falconer, 264

Coromandel Coast, 70 Fatehpur Sikri, 203-212

Councils, Buddhist, 120, 138 Fergusson, Sir James, 196,

Crawford, Marion, 94, 320 209, 217, 233

Cremation, 158, 161 Firozabad, 227

Cross, the Southern, 79 Flaxman, 32

Cunningham, General, 131, Forward Party, the, 284

138, 141, 242 Frontier, the Northwest, 276,

Curzon, Lady, 97 277, 281, 282

Curzon, Lord, 97, 98, 226, 276, Fuel, 11

279, 355 Fuller, Loie, 236

Dak bangla, 11, 18, 35, 36, Gadsbvs, the, 241, 320

38, 72, 125, 126, 298, 323, Gandamak, treaty of, 283

324, 358 Ganesha, 23, 76

INDEX 397

Ganges, 86, 105, 153 Jasmine Tower, 194, 195, 342

Gaya, 124, 125 Jats, 192, 193, 195

Gboom, 109 Jehad, 281

Gbor Kattri, the, 273 Jellalabad, 275

Golden Mosque, 253 Jewels, 17, 25, 26, 51, 52, 53,

Golden Temple, 300, 303 54, 64, 71, 222, 223, 224,

Gopis, 74, 76, 97 268, 305, 329

Gopura, 15, 24, 31, 41 Jeypore, 344-355

Granth, 303 Jinrikisha, 318, 357

Grapes, 272, 294

Greco-Buddhist art, 80, 178, Kabul, 264, 265, 272, 290, 293

242 Kadam, 280, 291

Guides, 22, 23, 177, 204, 205, Kafila, 272

378, 381 Kafirs, 277

Gujaek, 248, 272 Kailas, the, 373, 374, 376

GuUstan, 328 Kalka, 313, 317, 321

Gwalior, 335-343 Kalyan, 377

Kandahar, 273

Hair-cutting, ceremonial, 201 Kanishka, 120, 273

Hauksbee, Mrs., 2^1, 320 Kapilavastu, 117, 119

Himalayas, 107, 112, 113, 278, Karli, 378, 381

313, 318 Kashmir, 298, 300, 305, 309,
Hindu Kush, 258, 276, 278 310

Hiouen Thsang, 123, 131, 139, Kasyapa, 119

273 Khairabad, 259, 295

Hobson, 228 Khan, Colonel Islam, 289

Hong Kong, 299 Khusru, 229

Horse-dealers, 272, 317 Khyber Pass, 261, 272, 279,
Hotels, 65, 86, 87, 93, 94, 177, 280, 281, 289-295

213, 313, 318, 319, 345, 383 Khyber Rifles, 289

Humayum, 227, 228 Kim, the Rishti, 242, 247,
Hunter, Sir William, 241 304, 312, 319

Hyderabad, 323 Kineob, 167, 364

Kipling, Rudyard, 94, 239,
Indrapat, 227 240, 242, 244, 260, 262, 285,

Indus, 258, 259 296, 319, 320, 321

Isaacs, Mr., 319, 320 Kite-flying, 254

I 'tamadu-daulah, 199 Koh-i-nur, 216, 230, 242, 291,

299

Jade, 217, 223, 254, 305, 306 Koran, 218

Jahangir, 212, 242, 249, 255 Krishna, 74

Jahanira, 195, 229 Kunehinjinga, 108, 112, 113

Jails, 274, 330, 343 Kutab n'linar, 227, 233, 234
Jains, 221, 358, 361, 362, 363,

373, 375 Ladak, 254

Jakko, 319, 321 Lahore, 239-255, 261

Jama Masjid, 218, 229, 248, Lalla Rookh, 255

340 Lawrence, Henry, 180, 283

Japanese, 146, 225, 333 Levee, the viceregal, 97

398

INDEX

Light of Asia, the, 130, 148
Lockhart, General, 284
Lonauli, 378, 382
Lucknow, 177-182
Luggage, 114, 115, 149
Lundi Khana, 280, 281
Lundi Kotal, 281, 289
Lytton, Lord, 226

Macaulay, T. B., 241
Madras, 65, 66, 80-85
Madura, 10-18
Maghada, 116, 117
Magistrate, 39
Magyar, 299
Mahabalipur, 73, 370
Mahabodhi, 116, 129
Maharaja of Benares, 175,

176
Maharaja of Sindhia, 192,

336 342
Mahatma, 167, 172, 228, 320
Mahrattas, 215, 336, 341
Manaar, Gulf of, 3
Manure cakes, 11
Massoula-boats, 84
Mayo College, 327
Meean Mir, 247
Mecca, 116, 181, 209, 267, 390
Michni Pass, 282, 286
Midway Plaisance, 60
Mirza Jahangir, 229
Mission Avork, 16, 30
Moguls, 194
Molla, 267, 283
Monkey, 167, 218
Moses, 264

Mosque, 181, 195, 196, 363
Miiller, Max, 123, 241
Mumtaz-i-Mahal, 189, 195,

199, 212, 229
Museums, 80, 99, 178, 241,

347
Mussaffirkhana, 335
Mutiny, the, 178, 179, 180,

182, 215, 217, 225, 228, 299
Mutton. 218

Nadir Shah, 215, 217, 230,

258, 291
Nandgaon, 369, 370
Nankow Pass, 292
Napoleon, 284
Native states, 323, 324
Nautch dance, 59, 60, 61, 71,

236, 348, 352, 355
Nawab, the bogus, 345, 346,

347, 378
Nepal, 113
Newspapers, 94
Nicholson, John, 263, 283
Nirvana, 118, 133, 139, 145,

148
Nizam, the, 284, 323, 375
Nur Jahan, or Nur Mahal,

199, 212, 255

Opium, 348

Oven, of India, 247, 263

Pachisi, 206

Pagan, 90

Pagodas, the Seven, 67

Palaces, 12, 96, 175, 194, 195,

204, 205, 206, 327, 328, 329,

339, 351, 354
Pali, 120, 123
Palk Strait, 3

Parsis, 99, 384, 385, 386, 390
Pathans, 260, 264, 290
Pattu Thacheadar, 56, 62, 63
Peacock Throne, 216, 217, 218,

228, 230
Pegu, 90
Persia, 285

Peshawar, 242, 254, 260-275
Peter the Great, 285
Phalgu Eiver, 129, 148
Philistines, 192, 196
Phulkari, 268
Pie, 278
Pigeons, 230
Finns longifolia, 314
Piprawah, 99, 117, 120
Pipul-troo, 133, 134, 274

INDEX

399

Poona, 377

Pop-corn, :^71

Population, 101

Poultry, 218

Povindahs, 272

Prince of Wales, 26, 193, 217

Races, 96

Railways, 9, 10, 104, 106, 114,

115, 182, 256, 257, 334, 368,

369, 377, 382
Rajput, 117, 327, 354, 358
Ramnuggur, 175
Rangoon, 90, 228, 272
Razais, 37
Relics of Buddha, 99, 117,

120
Residency, Lucknow, 179, 180
Rhinoceros, 94, 341, 351
Rhys Davids, Dr., 123
* ' Rickshaw. ' ' See Jinrikisha
Roaches, 3, 76, 90
Roberts, Lord, 181, 225, 263
Rock sculptures, 73, 74, 75,

340, 370, 373, 374, 375, 378,

389 -
Rugs, 268

Runjeet Singh, 248, 299
Russian advance, the, 248,

277, 284, 285

Sadi, 229

Safdar Jang, 233

Safed Koh, 259, 275

Saints, 206, 267, 274, 283

Samarkand, 265, 268, 271

Samovar, 265

Sanchi, toran of, 99, 142

Sanskrit, 120, 123

Schwartz, 32

Scythian, 264

Secundra, 203

Selim Chisti, 206, 207

Serai, 273, 390

Servants, 150

Shah Jahan, 194, 212, 216,

227 229 249
Shalimar Gardens, 254

Shanghai, 299

Shere Ali, 282

Shish Mahal, 328

Shiva, 15, 41, 163, 166, 373,

376, 378, 389
Shoes, 266
Sieges, 179, 180
Sikhs, 242, 244, 249, 298, 299,

300
Simla, 95, 241, 312, 318-321
Sinnett, A. P., 94, 320
Snakes, 150, 389
Solon, 317, 321
Soorajbux, 327, 333
Southey, 74
Sowar, 280
Srirangam, 23, 24
Steele, Mrs. F. A., 149, 182,

225, 241
Sujata, 118

Swamji, 167, 168, 171, 172
Sweetmeats, 248, 267, 272

Taj Mahal, 185-194, 210, 227,

229, 300, 333, 342, 343
Tamils, 7
Tanjore, 30-33
Telegraphs, 7, 8, 34
Telephone, 83
Temple, Sir R., 283
Teppa Kulam, 12
Theosophists, 64, 81
Thorvaldsen, 75
Thugs, 37

Tibet, 108, 110, 111
Tiger, 146

Tonga, 313, 370, 377
Tottenham Court Road, 249
Towers of Silence, 386
Tramp, 33
Triehinopoli, 22, 23
Tughlak, 227, 235
Turbans, 336
Turquoise, 112, 223, 254
Tuticorin, 4, 7, 8

Unicorn, 341, 351
Uruwcla, 117, 118

400 INDEX

Vazir Khan, Mosque of, 250 Waziris, 277

Vedas, 154, 171, 328 Weddings, 221, 322, 348, 384,

Vereshehagin, V., 199, 209, 385

263, 264 Whisky, "Green Seal," 318
Viceroy, 95, 96, 98, 218

Vihara, 273, 374, 381 Yarkand, 254, 304

Warburton, Colonel, 284, 286,

289 Zanzamah, the, 242

Waterloo, 284 Zenana, 206, 212, 329, 330,

Waxwork, Afghan, 271 351

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